Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.
Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.
Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it.
Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.
The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.
Most things don't stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it
And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.
One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page.
The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.
When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.
You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.
I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.
Just as there are rocks which receive the constant shock and spray, the battering of waves, so there are heads about which passions roar.
And all Halloween candy pales next to candy corn, if only because candy corn used to appear, like the Great Pumpkin, solely on Halloween.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Terror is glamour - not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.
In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.
What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.
I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.
So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy, the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew.
Historians of European royalty have written of the king's 'two bodies' : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.
Often a performance can be judged not by a movie's strongest moment but by its weakest, especially when it's the picture's crucial scene.
Yes, I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure'. It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.
Preserving that privacy between a writer and the work is important. You have to shut out all those voices that have reacted to your work.
The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.
Freedom was given to humanity by God. But, governments, if they can help it, never give freedom. They just hand out slavery with slogans.
My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.
Jesus. Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Delilah, Jezebel, Salome, Judith, Eve. Trouble, every last one. Add Minerva Highwood to the list.
I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
In a bowl to sea went wise men three, On a brilliant night of June: They carried a net, and their hearts were set On fishing up the moon.
There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
Not only had he lost the only girl he'd ever loved, he'd lost her in duplicate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant.
I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.
What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory.
I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
Dead people can be our heroes because they can't disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.
He's one of the last friends I have," she says, her voice breaking. "I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at you the same way again.
Insurgent, he says. Noun. A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as a belligerent.
The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.