Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.
I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.
There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.
I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.
I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.
I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole, and pull the trap door down over your head.
People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.
I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
I believe I can solve others' problems. It's great when it works, but for the most part, it's very unappealing.
If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.
This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.