Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.
I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.
I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.
If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.
when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.