Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.
I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.
There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.
I think when you see [Donald] Trump in person, my reaction is you kind of enjoy it. It's kind of an enjoyable night out.
Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.
I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.
It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.
I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.
Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.
Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.
I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?
The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.
I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.
I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.
I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.
All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.
I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.
I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.
If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.
For me, when I'm coming up to a place where I have to make somebody up, it's almost like driving and taking your hands off the wheel.
I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.
Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.
That's the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, "Well, I don't know what this adds up to, but I can do the best I can."
So many people mentioned this at these rallies. You go to these things and it's kind of like an oldies concert. I mean, it's not hostile.
Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.
It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.
According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible.
It's one thing to be a perfectionist when you're alone, but when you're trying to make it work in an ensemble that's a whole different deal.
We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.
Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
Whatever happens, we can deal with it if we admit that it's happening and so on. So to be comfortable with what is - that is a real superpower.
As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.
I think when you get to export your creative impulse into something, it kind of lessens that busy energy that can be so confrontational and pissy.
If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.
I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any great writer.
I watched a bunch of kids movies on Christmas. I was kind of joking with our family by asking, "Is anyone allowed to die in a kid's movie anymore?"
It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.