Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm just a regular Joe.
Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.
Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.
Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.
I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.
Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice.
A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.
I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.
Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.
A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.
I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.
But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.
A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.
Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.
Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.
But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.
It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.
I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.
I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.
I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.
I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.
Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.
It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.
But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.
Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.
We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.
Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up.
I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.