Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Lists are a form of power.
Good writing is always new.
Things are not what they seem.
I was no good at being a child.
It's a terrible poison, writing.
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
Literary critics make natural detectives.
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.