Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.
I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.
I was ridiculed in public school for being smart. A teacher's pet.
Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.
Though I'm a New Englander, I'm very indoorsy once the mercury drops.
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
Sometimes the writing leads to the revelations, not the other way around.
When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.
Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.
But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.
Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.
I continue to shun, in a very curmudgeonly fashion, things like Twitter and Facebook.
The best booksellers are like trustworthy pushers: Whatever they're dealing, you take it.
Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.
Somewhat sadly, the survival of many bookstores now depends on selling merchandise other than books.
I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing.
When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.
As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.
I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.
I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about... the world I live in.
Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.
Knowing and understanding the people we love most is a process that continues well beyond their deaths... and is never complete.
I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!
Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.
The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.'
My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar.
To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.
I don't see how you can write well if you're not reading well at the same time. I think the only risk is reading too many books of one 'type' in a row.
My publisher is generous with deadlines, which are never set in stone. Some writers need that pressure, but I am more productive when there's less panic.
Over time, it's occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about.
I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.
I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.
And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.
Winter sports aren't my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles.
The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.
I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.
When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'
Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses.
All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.
I grew up in a home where animals were ever-present and often dominated our lives. There were always horses, dogs, and cats, as well as a revolving infirmary of injured wildlife being nursed by my sister the aspiring vet.
All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.
In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.
It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.
Finally, in my early 30s, I started writing fiction for the first time as an adult. That felt so scary, and I spent a few years feeling miserably 'behind' my high-achieving friends. But I persevered and obviously have no regrets.
I love to eat, I love to feed people, and I'm a great cook. I joked with my friends that I wanted to write a book where desserts had to be extensively researched, since I have a terrible sweet tooth. My particular downfall is cake.
I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.
My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.
In my fairly disorganized life, yellow stickies are too easily lost, and as for software, I try to avoid using my computer as much more than a typewriter and a post office. I rely on my lifelong habit of daydreaming to spin my stories.