Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.