Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
After a few minutes, it was time for me to leave. I don't know who decides these things. It just happens.
When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'
the heart that is truly virtuous is ever inclined to pity and forgive the errors of its fellow-creatures.
All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.
As for being somewhere you're not supposed to be - maybe you're here for a reason, or there is no reason.
With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.
One of my grandsons used to insist, when he was only 3 or 4, that he had been born and had lived in India
So there’s an . . . an etiquette to raking. Some seducer’s code of honor. Is this what you’re telling me?
In a story, the craftsmanship is fully exposed. A novel is like charity; it covers a multitude of faults.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man.
Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.
The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can [...] be closed with a shout of recognition.
Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.
If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?
I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.
I feel like someone is pressing me into a mold that does not fit my body, forcing me intothe wrong shape.
You are far less likely to soil your pants and cry for your mother if you’re prepared to defend yourself.
I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.
The creative genius begins in the idle moment, dreaming up the impossible, and later making it come true.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.
We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
This high official, all allow, is grossly overpaid; there wasn't any Board, and now there isn't any Trade.
The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.
It's not a man's working hours that are important--it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make.
The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.
I never can stand seeing people pleased with themselves,” said Joanna. “It arouses all my worst instincts.
Difficulties are made to be overcome ~ Miss Felicity Lemon, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Plymouth Express
If someone says Wes Anderson is an auteur, I'll believe it 100 percent. Fine. He's an auteur, but I'm not.
I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.
I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.
How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.
Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.