Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don’t like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels … I keep my deep radical things for my novels.
It is a common trait of primates to become submissive and even worshipful toward one who has the power to kill them.
Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.
It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.
Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.
I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary...
He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?
The heart of a woman is never so full of affection that there does not remain a little corner for flattery and love.
'Curio vult advisari,' as the lawyers say; which means, 'Let us have another glass, and then we can think about it.'
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.
But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.
Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.
Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.
Why is it always the world? Why is it never just half a block? Or Jersey? You know, something we could live without?
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.
All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.
Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.
We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.
It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
There was a place in childhood that I remember well, And there a voice of sweetest tone bright fairy tales did tell.
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.
Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.
The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.
There was no DVR, no Netflix, and no binge-watching. We didn't even have a VCR till I was nearly out of high school.
On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.
One, if one is sensible, blames government, not the servers of government, not those entangled in their governments.