Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are no rules in art.
I garden. It's very relaxing to me.
Memory changes as a person matures.
Men generally do not see women as competition.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.
We chart delusions through collective agreement.
We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.
I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.
Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.
Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.
We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating.
In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.
Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.
Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious.
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.
Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.
Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.
Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor.
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.
Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.
I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.
Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.
Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]