Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.
In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier. We all grieve alone.
So much of life is in the smallness of moments...but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.
My gift to you will be to take away your freedom of choice for a while. Freedom can be very unhealthy and unproductive. Instead, you'll have freedom from choice.
Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.
Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.
It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.
I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at.
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
She loves you, loathes you, treats you well, then ill. Like a leech or a surgeon's knife, she's double-edged: sometimes she'll cure, but sometimes she will kill.
If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.
For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.
I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.
I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.
Men blackmailing you as a woman leads you to trivialise sex and say 'it's not important, what is important is myself as a person, no one owns me because of sex.'
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
I would prefer to battle the 'I'm special' feeling not by the thought, 'I'm no more special than anyone else,' by by the feeling, 'Everyone is as special as me.'
Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge-the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.
Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,' said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.
I am not, sir, a bad person, though in truth I am not lacking in reasons for being one. [Sp., Yo, senor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarian motivos para serlo.]
We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them.
Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?
When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.
By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass.
Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.
I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.
Discover your own style. Don't try to repeat what has already been written - have the courage to do your own thing and don't be afraid to do something different.
I'm quite intrigued by the notion of a book that is completely self-contained but related to another book. I've coined a rather hideous word for it - a paraquel.
After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you.
If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.
Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.
it's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.
We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.
Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.
People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.