Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have never been much of a researcher
It's gratifying to be taken seriously, always.
Some people are uncomfortable saying what they feel.
Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.
I really like to entertain myself in various ways when I'm writing.
The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.
This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it.
Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.
You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.
People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.
I'm not particularly good at doodling. I'll doodle the same face over and over again.
I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.
Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.
I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.
I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.
Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star.
The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.
I'm really interested in women of different generations... I think there is no one female experience.
Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?
'Pleasure' is a word I think about a lot, as opposed to 'entertainment.' They are very, very different.
It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.
I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.
Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.
I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.
For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.
Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.
Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.
We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.
If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.
In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.
In 'The Interestings' I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.
But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.
When you have a book out, it's like a period of protracted or concentrated megalomania, and it's really not normal or good for you or any of that.
I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.
We all would love the idea of people getting what's coming to them in books and in life, but sometimes the trajectory is a little more complicated than that.
But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.
The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.
Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.
And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?
People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.
I think everyone is always measuring themselves against other people to a certain degree; it happens automatically, and it's hard not to be this way at least some of the time.
After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.
We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need.
While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.
Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.
But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.
As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.
Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.
These are old issues. Female power, misogyny, the treatment of women, how you make meaning in the world. And these are all issues that I've been thinking about and writing about for a very long time.