Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've got a library copy of Gone with the Wind, a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!
I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.
The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.
I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it.
My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?
that you seemed almost as fearful of notice and praise as other women were of neglect. (Edmund to Fanny)
He certainly is very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person.
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.
Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.
I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
That slow smile again. I love that smile! DId I think he was ugly just now? No, his face is transformed.
The last few weeks, it was as if someone had taken his life to pieces and let him see the way it worked.
People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.
It's much easier to identify and fix problems in language and timing when you hear the words being read.
We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.
As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion.
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.
I bet you cook good, huh?" Darlene asked. "Mother doesn't cook," Ignatius said dogmatically. "She burns.
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.
Let's take a drive into the middle of nowhere with a packet of Marlboro lights and talk about our lives.
I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing.
I'm trying to get under people's skin in a way. I don't like films that go in one ear and out the other.
Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.
I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.
i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.
One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.
The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.
i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.