Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.
Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
I think it's poignant and powerful, this idea that if someone knows your name, they have the ability to kind of hail you and make demands upon you.
And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.
I couldn't help but wonder if that was what love was -- believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count
If a man has a right to be proud of anything, it is of a good action done as it ought to be, without any base interest lurking at the bottom of it.
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
My greatest accomplishment is Exodus. It changed a lot of peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene.
Memories are so two-faced. One minute they're hugging you like a long-lost friend, the next minute they're ripping you apart like your worst enemy.
I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.
[She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.
Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I'm out of my sphere now, for woman's special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens
I'll try and be what he loves to call me, 'a little woman,' and not be rough and wild, but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else.
Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.
You can't hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year.
Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.
Put cotton in your ears and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant old age.
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
When I'm writing a book, I draw from my immediate experience, and my books are therefore almost a snapshot of where I am at that moment in my life.
I don't like this idea of division: that if you're a clever woman then you've got to be a particular way. Because men don't. Men please themselves.
My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.
I wanted to write at school - to write funny stories which the teacher might ask me to read out to the class. It's all basically about showing off.
I can remember being fascinated by what people really thought about each other and what they were really doing to each other behind people's backs.
Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
All reduction of people to objects, all imposition of labels and patterns to which they must conform, all segregation can lead only to destruction.
In a ghost story, usually you've got to hang on until daylight, and you'll be alright. But if daylight's four months away, then you have a problem.
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
You've gotten so caught up in being alone that you're afraid of what might happen if you actually find someone else that can take you away from it.
She was struck by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.
It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.
I looked in the mirror and stared at my reflection, until I was in the head-clearing trance that comes when you stare at something for a long time.
I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.
Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.
I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.
Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai. "What?" "About your having diarrhea." "For you I'd get dysentery." "Now that's friendship.
One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?
The same substance composes us--the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star--we are all one, all moving to the same end.
I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.
We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.
I don't read my own books, but sometimes if there is a new edition I open it and then I feel this life of a writer was not so hopeless, not so bad.
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.