Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?
Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?
I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.