Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living
We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.
Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
If a man is going to leave one wife to marry another, it's better if he divorces the first before he marries the second.
(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.
Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.
To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind
I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.
I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.
When I get to the end of my life, I want to be able to look back and know that my being here made things better - Daphne
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
We have all of us the two natures - the brother and the sister! Not one of us is quite woman - not one of us is all man!
I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.
I think that usually the risk in trying to write children in fiction is the tendency to make them too cute or something.
Granuaile:"So why don't cult leaders achieve godhood?" Atticus:" Because they're megalomaniacs drenched in douche juice.
The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition.
Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
What I find sad is that the New Age movement is primarily a commercial undertaking. But it is answering to a human need.
If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory. We've forgotten who we are.
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.
It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
You can become anything you want to be ... It's a matter of authority. Whatever a man's confidence, that's his capacity.
My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.
For me, who loves to draw and who loves to write and cannot choose between one or the other, the comic is the best form.
I wanted to do my artistic work, and in Iran you have censorship. It was difficult for me to do the work I wanted to do.
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.
Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.
Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.