Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.
That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.
I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.
Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
Broken locks and bruised knees and borrowed lipgloss and rain on the streets
I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.
Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity.
Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman.
It is preferable to incur a mild punishment than to perform an onerous task.
Home is where the heart is or where you bury the ones you want to eat later.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'
We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.
People are not saints just because they haven't got much money or education.
After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.
What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.
Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession.
I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
my friends plunged into a borderless sea of reminiscences and personal news.
The wind smelled clean, like clean magazines. It smelled like invisible ink.
We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.
That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.
Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.
Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.
You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other.
What about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms?
I had no intention of pursuing either the characters or the setting further.
There are secret passages all around you if you know where to look for them.
The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.
Nobody should have to clean up what goes on around the base of most toilets.
It seems like for the last 10 years, I've just been investing in the future.
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works Must yield at length to Time.
My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right: you can never have too much.