Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some people should never meet.
Sarte was right, Hell is other people
Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.
I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.
I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read.
I'm slightly in awe of writers, such as Sophie Hannah, who follow outlines.
I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.
I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.
I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.
We moved around a lot when I was kid. I'd lived in three continents before I was 12.
Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.
Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened.
With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.
I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.
You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.
I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different
Everybody has ways in which they've been lucky in life, and everybody also has ways in which they've definitely rolled snake eyes.
We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.
I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.
I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.
One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.
Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.
But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.
With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.
If you're too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people's lived experience is real when it doesn't match up with yours.
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.
It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.
Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.
I like books like 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,' where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.
Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either.
I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.
Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.
I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack