Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird
I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.
There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private
Expecting to be wrong about most things most of the time brings, finally, the kind of humility that leads to peace. I think.
Well, this is good for me, this is experience, I am here for a reason, these moments run into pages, the seamy side of life.
Like my father, I am very impatient. I have a strong bullshit detector. I may finish one book in twenty that I have started.
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
One of the many interesting challenges nature presents us is its apparent disinterest in maintaining the order humans crave.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
People ought to be slapped up side of the head, not always get what they expect. That's why sometimes the bad guy gets away.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country.
We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.
I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
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.
What is there unreasonable in admitting the intervention of a supernatural power in the most ordinary circumstances of life?
If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
You big crybaby," I whispered into his ear. "Now you know why your mom warned you not to hit girls. Sometimes they hit back.
You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae
The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.
The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.
I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.
So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman's body?
I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.
I put in my list all the busy, useful independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.
So she doesn't call desertion, poverty, and hard work troubles? She's a brave little girl, and I shall be proud to know her.
I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.
I have been lucky enough to travel a lot, meet great people in many lands. I have liked almost everyone I met along the way.
Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.
Grief is, of all the passions, the one that is the most ingenious and indefatigable in finding food for its own subsistence.
Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
I am prone to despair. We are all born with a particular personality. I get afraid and then I don't want to leave the house.
There's a part of 'Twin Peaks' that is sort of a hinged doorway to another, stranger place, if you can imagine such a thing.
All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.
Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.