Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.
I've been very lucky. There were times when I was afraid I would never sell another book, but I never doubted I'd write another book.
I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.
Nevertheless, she did not weep, because, for one thing, it would have made her eyes red, and another, it would be of very little use.
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
A man notices a woman's figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.
Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.
That's the best thing that's ever happened to me, bar none, is having grandchildren and living by them and being part of their lives.
Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.
I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.
When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.
Whatever storm was brewing, I'd find it and fight it. If it was the price of being with Curran, then I would pay it. He was worth it.
No genuine observer can decide otherwise than that the homes of a nation are the bulwarks of personal and national safety and thrift.
Well, hello, Peter,” said Lupin pleasantly, as though rats frequently erupted into old school friends around him. “Long time, no see.
Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight.
Everybody finished the song at different times. At last, only the Weasley twins were left singing along to a very slow funeral march.
There is plenty of ambitious competition and hypocrisy in the middle class, which makes it a rather fertile environment for a writer.
Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.
Sorry,” he said, his voice thick and gruff. “It’s morning and you’re sitting on me. That’s a combination meant to bring any man down.
You sure about this?" he asked in a guttural voice. "I get down on that mattress right now, I'm not stopping until I'm inside of you.
I am very comfortable with conflict, be it of the legal or mortal kind. My father was a mediator, a bridge maker. I am a grave maker.
No matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.
Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I'll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
The more I see of the world, the more am i dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistencies of all human.
Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's.
Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. . . . Every moment rather brought fresh agitation. It was an overpowering happiness.
Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.
It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.
The pure in heart are slow to credit calumnies, because they hardly comprehend what motives can be inducements to the alleged crimes.
There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.
The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.
A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.