Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hungry ears are sharp ones.
Novelists never have to footnote.
Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
My mom was paranoid about my safety.
People are quite frequently eccentric.
Respect and fear are two different things.
People with good intentions never give up!
An urban novelist never minds a little decay.
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.
The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.
English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.
I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
My great fear is not that I'll run out of ideas. It's that I'll run out of time.
Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.
The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.
Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.
A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.
Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.
The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.