Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We tire differently if we love or love not.
Much of my work has been done in first person.
Lying is our stock-in-trade as social creatures.
I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.
I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.
I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.
A person always has a chance to protest this or that.
I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.
This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.
As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.
I am clearer in my mind and a bit less confused than I used to be.
Books should have a purpose. Books should be practical in some sense.
I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.
I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.
I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.
The move to hide aging is sort of sad. But it's a wonderful thing to celebrate our aging.
I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.
Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.
As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.
I like small books. I like durable books. I like plain books. I like small type and thin pages.
Malicious lying is usually a matter of need, but often the cruelest things we say are the truth.
Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so.
The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.
If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.
As humans, we're so easily persuaded. We join this cause or that cause, and suddenly the other thing is wrong.
Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.
Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.
I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.
I don't start with an idea or concept in the sense that I flesh out an idea or concept and set it at the center of something.
If Americans are to read something that is difficult, they will only do so supposing they will be admired for having done it.
That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!
I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to the window to see what it was.
I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.
Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.
It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.
New York feels like sometimes it's not part of the United States. So does L.A. Chicago feels like it's a big city that's part of America.
To a liar, the most dangerous individual is the person who catches lies but doesn't say anything about it. Then the liar isn't sure which lies are compromised.
I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.
I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.
The crucial thing in any work of any kind is that it must be a gift - the reader must possess it even more than the person who wrote it. It must be given completely.
When I was in high school, I had a notebook that I filled up with rules about lying. It must have been a hundred pages long - one hundred pages of rules about lying!
The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.
A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.
A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.
I believe my friends think I'm funny. All the books are full of humor. Maybe it is a quiet sort of humor that masquerades as not-much-at-all. It is certainly easy to miss.
I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.
I think a book is often an account, or a series of accounts, that create a world that is sort of half of the world. There are references to a world, and then the reader supplies the other fifty percent.
As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'
In life, people talk at right angles. One asks a question, and the other replies in part, then uses that part to move the conversation to something else. Everyone has an agenda, has something they're trying to say - or not say.