Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with.
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
It'sthe fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.
Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.
she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.
There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.
Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.
I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion.
[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
The technology I like is the American paperback edition of 'Freedom.' I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology.
I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
I know what paranoia is like. I know what it is like to worry about what people are saying about you and become obsessed with what people are saying about you.
It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.