Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I'm a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.
I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.
Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking.
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.
The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
There's no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.
I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.
At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.
Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.
It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.
...surely I could give him--a sort of contentment... That isn't enough to give. Not for the giver.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
Lack of genius never held anyone back. Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.
What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys?
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.
Indignation does no good unless it is backed with a club of sufficient size to awe the opposition.
I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.
I miss smoking (two to four packs a day) but I don't miss the crackle in my lungs when I breathed.
Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.
It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Honer and self sacrifice. Death does not diminish these qualities in a soldier. We shall remember.
Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.
Travelling is the ruin of all happiness. There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
To save the mind from preying inwardly upon itself, it must be encouraged to some outward pursuit.