Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.
My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.
I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement.
During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.
Who has told you that the fruit belies the flower? For the fruit you have not tasted, and the flower you know but by report.
Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms -- a pistol -- perhaps a revolver.
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.
Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.
Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you're going to lose before you start. It's fun just playing them.
You just do the best you can, and when you're able to connect with people, and when you do, it's just incredibly gratifying.
A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing
I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this.
Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
[The English] find ill-health not only interesting but respectable and often experience death in the effort to avoid a fuss.
I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. Money comes and goes.’ I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter and you know it doesn’t.
I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.
I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.
But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.
It is with the approach of winter that cats...wear their richest fur and assume an air of sumptuous and delightful opulence.
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.
I have admired Melissa Pritchard's writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.
Sex is like nose picking. It's fine as long as you practice it yourself, but it's disgusting watching someone else doing it.
Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.
My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt.
Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?
Susanne Alleyn's Game of Patience is a well-crafted historical mystery, authentic in every detail. Wonderfully entertaining.
I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.
...A scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival...(Here be Dragons)
All writers are magpies, right? We're always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.
And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter.
I love food. I'm a complete foodie. I love to cook. I find it very hard to say no to food. I get grumpy if I don't get food.
I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.