Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.
Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.
The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.
My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.
Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift.
Sometimes my plot lines are so convoluted, I get calls from friends at 3 am saying; you SOB, you'll never pull this one off.
Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.
The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.
It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.
Foreign-language books are sometimes more beautiful when you can't tell what's being said. It's like you ruin it by reading.
Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.
Motherhood is not for the faint-hearted. Frogs, skinned knees, and the insults of teenage girls are not meant for the wimpy.
.. that terrible feeling that you're not good enough to be loved by the people you love most, and eventually by anyone else.
I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.
Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.
When I teach writing, I have a mantra: Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.
The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn't mean you won't behave like a devil at the first opportunity.
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.
Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
Raising children is like making biscuits: it is as easy to raise a big batch as one, while you have your hands in the dough.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.
Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced.
I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.
Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.
Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.
The right I claim is that of every human being to speak what he believes to be the truth to whomever he may meet on his way.
Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.
Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
I knew a man once who told me that I smiled at the wrong things." "Do you? "Only by the light of those who smile at nothing.
It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.
If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.