Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It occurs to me that even though Zoya and I are both still alive, my life is already over. She will be taken from me soon and there will be no reason for me to continue without her. We are one person, you see. We are GeorgyandZoya.
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects? It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women?and absurd.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France, and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold.
How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clus-ters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.
The writer's advantage, in some respects, over those whose expression lies in other fields, is in the privilege of a double - sometimes a triple - living. Pleasure multiplied in the mirrors of words, and pain siphoned off in words.
It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.
I love to eat, I love to feed people, and I'm a great cook. I joked with my friends that I wanted to write a book where desserts had to be extensively researched, since I have a terrible sweet tooth. My particular downfall is cake.
[I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet.
I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because Im not so censored when I use dream material.
The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.
My parents were reasonably affluent in Kabul. In the States, we were on welfare. My mom became a waitress, and my dad became a driving instructor. That part of the American immigrant experience applies to people of any nationality.
Nature provides that a man who slaves all day should spend the hours of the night in a palace full of houris whereas a king who wields the sceptre by day should have his sleep disturbed by nightmares of rebellion and assassination.
Ten cooks' shops! ...and all within three minutes' driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world ...had said - Come, let us all go live at Paris: the French love good eating - they are all gourmands - we shall rank high.
I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the Chronicles Of Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.
Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
I drop my kid off at school and then race home, and its a very limited time. I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk, I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I dont go running or hard hiking.
I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
As DH Lawrence said, the Protestant societies do dirt on sex, it is their dirty mind which aligns sex and a woman's genitals with the debased and soiled. This is something terrible, I think, and to be contended with head-on in art.
One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
I have no complaints about my path and the places it has taken me; enough complaints to fill a circus tent about other things, maybe, but the path I've chosen has always been the right one, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
I call it God Light, because it reminds me of heaven. Every time the light shines through the window we built or any window at all, you'll know I'm right there with you, okay? That's going to be me. I'll be the light in the window.
E-books present the greatest opportunity readers have ever had to find each other. It's a chance for stories written for paper to find new life and a chance for new stories to appear, freed from the constraints of paper publishing.
When I create a character, particularly my central character, I want someone who is interesting and feels real and who might have quite a few virtues but is unlikely to be perfect, who hasn't necessarily made all the right choices.
It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead.
The person whose clothes are extremely fine I am too apt to consider as not being possessed of any superiority of fortune, but resembling those Indians who are found to wear all the gold they have in the world in a bob at the nose.
One is always seeking the touchstone that will dissolve one's deficiencies as a person and as a craftsman. And one is always bumping up against the fact that there is none except hard work, concentration, and continued application.
When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. ... We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.
The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.
To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.
Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That's the way to crush a girl.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have sex with a man. To be so intimate with another person. Not to hide anything. I don’t know if I could do that. It would have to be a boy anyway, not a grown man, someone as scared as me.
What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.
Could there be irony crueler than this? How, upon his rescue, the truth had brought him here, to a house for the mad, for only a madman believes what every child knows to be true: There are monsters that lie in wait under our beds.
Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.
I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.
Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.
I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few.
I went to my 30th high school reunion, and I could tell who was gay and who was straight because the gay people were like, 'Sarah, you've been doing so much,' and the straight people were like, 'So, Sarah, what have you been doing?
How fragile life was, how fleeting their days on earth, and how fickle was Death, claiming the young as often as the old, the healthy as often as the ailing, cruelly stealing away a baby's first breath, a mother's fading heartbeat.
Generally as a rule I am not. Unless I am super in love with a particular author, because I just want to read masterpieces. I just want to read one amazing book after another. As a completist you are generally reading the bad ones.