Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Human love and desire is my bag.
I'm not despairing of love at all.
My country is nothing if not diverse.
We are each the love of someone's life.
It's funny how the present can change the past.
Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.
Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.
I grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much.
It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.
My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.
A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.
Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.
I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.
It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.
So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.
When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?
Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.
I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.
I was good in biology, but I did very badly in chemistry, and my parents were horrified by that.
When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.
An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?
How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.
I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'
I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.
For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.
I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.
I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.
I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'
I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.
'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.
Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.
I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do but either walk around or read a book or work on your book, and they all seem helpful.
My mother is a southern lady with short dark hair and a wary, blue-eyed smile. She is also an experimental chemist and teaches a college course entitled The Chemistry of Cooking.
Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.
I wake up at 10. I have coffee, and then I spend a half an hour on the computer, where I read newspapers and progressive blogs. I have to tear myself away, or I'll spend all day reading.
To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'
How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.
Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town.
To say 'A High Wind in Jamaica' is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. But that's completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.
I think I'm a terrible researcher. I find it very boring and frustrating, but the things you can find are better than what I could imagine. And when you find them, it's wonderful, and they don't feel artificial.