Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Death is the mother of beauty.
I knew every raindrop by its name.
We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.
There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.
With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.
There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that
Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.
She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.
I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ..."
They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.
I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.
That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.
I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.
All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.
She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up.
How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.
I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.
If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.