Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll onto the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus's. "I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave," he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. "I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service...my stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests, which has worked time and time again with PEN.
The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples.
She chews her lip, staring into my eyes. "Okay... Why did you kiss me in Austin?" I laugh softly and she frowns. "Sorry. That one's too easy." My gaze flicks to her mouth and back. "I'd wanted to kiss you ever since Quinton suggested playing spin the bottle, and by that night in your room, I'd run out of willpower to fight it.
...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
I look out the window again, taking slow, deep breaths into a body too tense to move. And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents’ God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel. -Tris Prior
Okay. Then...I can talk. Ask me something." "Okay." He laughs shakily in my ear. "Why is your heart racing Tris?" I cringe and say, "Well, I...I barely know you. I barely know you and I'm crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?"... "Maybe you were cut out for Candor," he says, "because you're a terrible liar.
You’re too important to just … die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me—his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?
The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters.
Perhaps lovers aren't supposed to look down at the ground. That kind of story is told in symbols-and earth represents reality, and reality represents frustrations, chance illnesses, death, murder, and all kinds of other tragedies. Lovers are meant to look up at the sky, for up there no beautiful illusions can be trampled upon.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.
Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.
As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
I try not to write more than two or three, I try to just write one if possible, I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes, I'll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.
Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.
I wrote 'Snowy' as a result of spending a week on a narrow boat with daily classes of children, helping them to write about canal life, the work of barges, the simple pleasure of watching the water creatures. There was no doubt that the star of their week was Snowy, the working barge horse who pulled us daily along the towpath.
The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.
Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
When you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own. This only looks like generosity.
Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can't help but picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone's idea of a "with-it" social register.
People who don't want to get on with their lives, and don't want to accept responsibility for the direction of their lives want to hang out with other people who don't want to accept responsibility or move on, and so you find that your entire culture around you are people who are just like you, because that's what's comforting.
Here's a slightly outrageous tip: Don't respect the text. Just because you've written something down doesn't mean it has a right to exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you can't find a better way, and the passage really isn't good, junk it.
I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the must absurd beauty.
My childhood was spent with dogs, and I work with dogs surrounding me. This relationship is hardly unique - man-and-dog stories date back to ancient history, up to 10,000 years ago - but it feels that way to me. I used to have a love-hate relationship with dog stories because some got the dynamic right but most were dead wrong.
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.
. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.
I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they're killed, someone who needs to be avenged. Their character doesn't matter much.
My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.
I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.
Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
The sky was a cold iron-grey, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality.
Severus, please fetch me the strongest truth potion you posess, then go down to the kitchen and bring up the house elf called Winky. Minerva, kindly go down to Hagrids house where you will find a large black dog sitting in the pumpkin patch. Take the dog up to my office, tell him I will be with him shortly, then come back here.
Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.
Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.
Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.
I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.
Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one could see the reeds and a stone lantern and the brightest of the evening's stars floating on the gloaming mirror of the pond. Then the breeze came again to crack the water's surface, and the picture was flooded.
For interns at 'The Weekly Standard' or 'National Review,' where the martial instinct finds its most insistent voice, what Robert Kagan calls the military 'career path' is not widely seen as a plausible future. Pulling a trigger is what Jose, Tyrone, and Bubba do, not early admission students at the better private universities.
The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.