Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everyone wants to be tested and challenged. Everyone would like a good, honest fight to exhaust their frustrations.
I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.
No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.
What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?
'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it.
Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.
You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.
Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.
I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I've studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it.
Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.
Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
There is something in the red of a raspberry pie that looks as good to a man as the red in a sheep looks to a wolf.
What is common sense? That which attracts the least opposition that which brings most agreeable and worthy results.
There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing - but we all do and call it Hope.
Autumn. Pretty leaves, pumpkin pie and sweaters. Perfect weather for reading. Winter is great but I hate shoveling.
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.
Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.
You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.
In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.
My mother relied on her memory to do things because she couldn't read. Part of that was not really knowing numbers.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess.
I got halfway through 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.' I don't get it at all. What's the big thrill? It's boring.
Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.