Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.
It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.
You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.
Standing on the fringes of life... offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.
People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.
I was needed, but I myself did not need. I had followers, but not allies, and only now do I understand the difference. And it is vast.
I have a slight addiction to Diet Coke, and, of course, I absolutely shouldn't touch it because it makes the kidneys work really hard.
The influence of woman will ever be exercised directly in all good or evil. Give her, then, such light as she is capable of receiving.
The horse world is populated by two kinds of people: those who love horses, and those who exploit horses and the people who love them.
I don't try to sugarcoat things, but I also think my books make positive statements about the people and values in small-town America.
I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
(Stereotyping) is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand.
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
Depression is like pushing a car up a hill. It takes all my energy to push the car up the hill. I don't have any energy left to write.
An artist gives. Gives visually, gives through courses, or with free advice, through generosity of spirit and through a need to share.
Psyche you out?" I repeat. "I'm your FRIEND. I wouldn't do that." He doesn't say anything. I can tell he doesn't believe me-not quite.
Relax Beatrice, I've driven a car before.' MARCUS 'I've done a lot of things before, but that doesn't mean I'm any good at them!' TRIS
No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can't even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.
Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.
I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
I have always thought if you are going to make a film, it's much better to have an original script that will play to film's strengths.
[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.
Then sing as Martin Luther sang, As Doctor Martin Luther sang, "Who loves not wine, woman and song, He is a fool his whole life long."
We pass by common objects or persons without noticing them; but the keen eye detects and notes types everywhere and among all classes.
Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
Kabuki is the way that I so often write; Noh is how I would write if I were more 'spiritual,' more understated, or perhaps just older.
Lips to lips, mouth to mouth, Comes the speaker of the shrouds, Suck in the spirit, speak the words, Let secrets of the dead be heard.
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
Then the fear all humans felt when met with Death’s gaze came over his face. That’s right buddy, I’m Death, now move away from my girl.
Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.
I write novels about women, except for one: 'Rococo', about a man, a New Jersey decorator. But even that book had a woman on the cover.
all women, without in the least meaning it, consider every man they meet as a possible husband for themselves or for their best friend.
Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.
I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.
...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go." From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist