Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.
When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused.
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives.
People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time.
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage.
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.