Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
I’ve always thought of myself as shy.
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
You need the art in order to love the life.
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.
E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.
Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.
You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.
Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.
If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.
The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).
But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.
I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.