Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbor’s name.
The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
The beliefs of Native people are no less powerful or important just because they focus on a different "form of magic."
Nobody said anything that time. Or maybe I just wasn’t listening. After all, someone had to keep an eye on the fridge.
The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.
The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.
I was unhappy with the jobs I did after law. I got into the diplomatic service. There again I had really little to do.
I definitely like clothes as much as the next girl, just not to the extent of people who work in the fashion industry.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
Insights and perceptions pass through the mind like fleet fireflies. Lit for an instant, then gone back into the dark.
When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.
We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.
…often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome.
Young people think they never can change, but they do in the most wonderful manner, and very few die of broken hearts.
Don't cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve with all your soul that you will never know another like it.
Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them.
In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework.
I was fat, and that was awful because when you're young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you're fat.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
It is often easier to justify one's self to others than to respond to the secret doubts that arise in one's own bosom.
Parents, whether or not we believe in a deity, know that to witness a child's mind searching for meaning is a miracle.
... I never will allow myself to form an ideal of any person I desire to see, for disappointment never fails to ensue.
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
True violence, not the kind you usually see in television or movies, touches something very deep and primal in people.
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.
No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime, let out all the length of all the reins.
Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.
A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study.
Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.
I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.
That one man scorned and covered with scars Still strove with his last ounce of courage To reach the unreachable star.
One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.
What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
I'm a book girl--I love all the stories the world has to offer. No matter the book, I will taste it and drink it down.
We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.
School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.
Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore.
There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
I don't want to live the rest of my life thinking about you and dreaming of what might have been. Stay with me, Allie.
Unless you had a popular video on YouTube or could perform shows in front of thousands, musical ability meant nothing.
The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.