Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I can be glib and truthful all at once.
To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.
I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.
Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.
Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.
Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book.
Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.
In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.
Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?
I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.
I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.
... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.
I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.
Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?
Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?
HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.