Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.
Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.
No matter where it is in the sky... No matter where you are in the world... the moon is never bigger than your thumb. -John
I have certain moral parameters that I do not cross in writing; I don't write about adultery or kids having premarital sex.
I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy.
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
The world is like a vast sea: mankind like a vessel sailing on its tempestuous bosom. ... [T]he sciences serve us for oars.
As few subjects are more interesting to society, so few have been more frequently written upon than the education of youth.
Scandals are like dandelion seeds--they are arrow-headed, and stick where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.
I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.
I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.
Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.
We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.
Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
But young hearts mend easily, and hearts that own half of England have something better to do than to beat faster for love.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.
There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.
My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.
... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so.
Writing monsters is fun, and it's easy. When I want one, I just reach under the bed and pull it out, kicking and screaming.
One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.
Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.
The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain
Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.
And my heart springs up anew, Bright and confident and true, And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.
How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?
That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.
I was never interested in film. Never. I never even thought of it. I wasn't even a film buff, I didn't see many films ever.
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.
The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.
Look bravely up into the sky, And be content with knowing That God wished for a buttercup Just here, where you are growing.
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.
Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart.
I don't think we should base so much on weight, muscles, and a good hair day, but when it happens, it's nice. It really is.
And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad.
I am influenced by books which dont have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.
I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.
My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.
Graduate school is a really supportive environment, but in a way, it was only when that support vanished that I flourished.