Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To me, point of view is everything.
I never set out to be a published writer.
Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?
Writers of literature make very little money.
What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.
A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.
I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.
I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.
Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.
Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.
It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.
Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.
The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.
I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.
I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.
Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'
I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.
I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.
You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.
I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.
I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.