Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me.
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Is there anyone in this apartment who hasn’t seen me naked?” I demanded, grabbing the sheet and the phone. “I genuinely hope so, Cassandra.
The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.
I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.
In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'
Wisdom eludes me yet, but foolishness I captured long ago and to this day it is my constant companion, though many people consider me wise.
I yawned and stretched luxuriously in the morning. I make noises when I stretch because it feels ten times better than stretching silently.
Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae
You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.
You usually dont know what you are going to write about so you go to the places and talk to the people who were identified with the events.
I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.
Prosperity suits some people, and they blossom best in a glow of sunshine; others need the shade, and are the sweeter for a touch of frost.
People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.
My only answer is, if my grave stood open on one side and you upon the other I'd go into my grave before I would take one step to meet you.
I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.
Guys know how to read each other's signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another.
I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.
The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.
There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
Isn't there any statute of limitation in things spiritual? I don't believe any large mind dwells on its sins, any more than on its virtues!
I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.
Once you know something is wrong, you're responsible, whether you see it, or hear about it, and most particularly when you're a part of it.
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.
I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.
We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
Avarice, with all its black attendants, is confessedly a crime of old age, and seldom arrives at maturity till accompanied with gray hairs.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
I think true wilderness can still be found, but it's hard to reach and dangerous when you get there, which is probably why it still exists.
There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences.
Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.
Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.
If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.
It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
What? You don't think he's cute?" "I didn't really notice." "How can you not notice when a guy is cute?" Melody stared at her in disbelief.
...nothing wonderful lasted forever. Joy was as fleeting as a shooting star that crossed the evening sky, ready to blink out at any moment.
I want to grow up to be Tom Keneally or David Malouf: still in the game, relevant, putting out quality work, and paying tax aged 78 and 80.
I'm not shy, exactly, but I am private. I don't like to talk about myself. I had to learn - I was interviewed for print, radio and even TV.
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.
We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.