Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
employers sense in me a denial of their values...they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.
New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.
Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?
Ye know what me Sean used to say, God rest his soul? He said, 'A friend will help ye move, Katie, but a really good friend will help ye move a body.
I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.
On one occasion I went to Afghanistan to look at the borders and learn something about the situation there to see if my book was there?and it wasnt.
Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.
In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He'd wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.
You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.
At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?
I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!
Teenagers are philosophers. They are thinking about the big things like existence and identity at a time when their identities are changing so fast.
I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.
People often ask writers where they get their inspiration, and for me, the short answer is that I haven't a clue; I'm just grateful that I get them.
I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado, or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at another man's table.
There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce.
I think being able to identify with young people and...their capacity to change the world and shake things up. I think that's the greatest strength.
It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
I'm sorry' I said again. Whenever someone tells you something said, it's the only thing you can think to say, even if you're already said it before.
Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.
He took a few steps before responding. "You are special," he finally said, and the way e said it made her wonder if he wanted to add something else.
Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life.
I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped.
I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're not so interesting.
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.
Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.
Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.
Maybe we're the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.
You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.
Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.
Real people - the interesting ones, anyway - don't remain static, and neither do the ones I write about. Changes take place, and they react to them.
I want to make a series of films of contemporary America that feel urgent and deal with sometimes-topical matters, but hopefully in a universal way.