Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!
Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer
I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about... the world I live in.
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?
I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.
I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.
One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.
I am persuaded that every time a man smiles - but much more so when he laughs - it adds something to this fragment of life.
Look at me, man, look at me and tell me I don't know what I'm about. I'm Conor Larkin. I'm an Irishman and I've had enough.
Any writer who believes in the 'lucky creative accident' in writing is pushing elephants on roller skates up greased ramps.
I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
But please hug and kiss me, everyone, and don't mind my dress, I want a great many crumples of this sort put into it today.
I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.
I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'
They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
... Love never forgets; or if it does, it is an imperfect love, like the beautiful love of a dog, faithful and unreasoning.
But I am a-eppisodin' and a-eppisodin' to a length and depth almost onprecedented and onheard of - and to resoom and go on.
The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.
That you prefer to rule through fear rather than justice? So sorry, Your Majesty, I’m afraid I already knew that about you.
If the weather is nice, I play tennis, which is pretty much the only exercise that I do. I try to do that as much as I can.
I don't normally associate bingeing of any kind with healthy results in life. And I'm not a binge-watcher by nature myself.
It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.
I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn't into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw--that of outright unreadability.
My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.
I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.
Be not under the dominion of thine own will; it is the vice of the ignorant, who vainly presume on their own understanding.
Jealousy sees things always with magnifying glasses which make little things large, of dwarfs giants, of suspicions truths.
All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage.
For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
In Japan, full-time homemakers have no economic power of their own, and they socially lead a faceless, anonymous existence.