Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.
You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.
In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.
Why don't you confer with Mr. Finnigan? As I recall, he has a particular proclivity for pyrotechnics.
I will be sharing additional information I've been hoarding for years about the world of Harry Potter
Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.
The presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that what they were doing was right.
I think that emotionally, I've probably felt a little bit more balanced when I started writing again.
When he looked at me, his eyes positively twinkled. Christ. I was screwed. Eyes were twinkling at me.
John? As it was dark he whistled a what. You are such a male of worth, you know that. You really are.
Life is too frickin' crazy sometimes, it really is.... You never know what's going to happen, do you.
But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.
I petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters.
As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.
Do not measure the number of tragedies you sustain, but to quantify the success you derive from them.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?
Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.
When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead.
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.
Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.
If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
When a woman dresses up for an occasion, the man should become the black velvet pillow for the jewel.
A journey takes time. And the lessons we learn best, they come from the journey, not the destination.
I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and Im enjoying it.
I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.
He had the look of an atheist who’d just had a visit from God: stunned, disbelieving and faintly ill.
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.