Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hurried business is bad business.
All you will get from me is death.
Work will drive you crazy if you let it.
It is true, I thought. I am living a life.
Working in a bar was a horrific idea for me.
It's healthy to have interests besides books.
Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.
When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble.
I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth.
I am a homebody, something that lends itself to my profession.
Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work.
Unfunny people should be locked up, the key tossed into a smelter.
I have a paranoia that 'Ablutions' is the best thing I'll ever do.
He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.
...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.
If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.
My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.
You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.
We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.
Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.
I don't know that happy people are interesting to write about - or to read about.
Why were you feeling low? Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.
I don't necessarily want to make people stomp and clap. I simply want to engage people.
I've always felt so fortunate to have writing to turn to every day. I'm obsessed with it.
It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.
I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic.
I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.
I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.
I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way.
The idea is this: It's important to upset one's work habits, to topple the cart for each project.
I felt like love has been underrepresented - unironic love, just actually really falling in love.
The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.
Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I’m sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.
I'm either enjoying myself or I'm not. And if I'm not enjoying myself, something's gone terribly wrong.
Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.
The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.
Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.
Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.
I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation.
Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them.
My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.
Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.
I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.
Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.
I've fallen in love in my life a few times. It's the most exciting part of being alive - that I've experienced, anyway.
He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.
'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.
I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.
I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. Money comes and goes.’ I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter and you know it doesn’t.
I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.