Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.
England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286
It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.
When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.
He seemed wild and dangerous and carefree--well, he would, would'nt he? What were motorcycles and black leather pants if not the uniform of a wild, dangerous and carefree man?
The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.
The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.
Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.
The human spirit can be indomitable and it is this rare quality that is not at all to be expected that makes survivors of us all, the human race in the grand scheme of things.
'High Concept' means a book or a film whose core idea can be stated in a single sentence, such as 'Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins.' Or, 'Arnold is pregnant.'
If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.
The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.
My employer uses twenty-six years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return for the enormous thing I am giving? What do I get in return for my life?
To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.
Doing field trips rather than simply researching online allows me to experience the story from the point of view of my main character; you can't get that by sitting at a desk.
The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.
It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
Women want the fairytale. Not all women, of course, but most women grow up dreaming about the kind of man who would risk everything for them, even knowing they might get hurt.
People will tell you most of the story… and I’ve learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they’re afraid.
But no matter what was going on in our lives, I could imagine lying beside her in bed at the end of the day, holding her while we talked and laughed, lost in each other's arms
So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.
For praise too dearly lov'd, or warmly sought, Enfeebles all internal strength of thought; And the weak soul within itself unblest, Leans for all pleasure on another's breast.
In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I'd leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.
I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.
The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.
Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.
The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
There is no such thing as an age for love ... because the man capable of loving - in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation - never ceases to love.
Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.
Why is it, I wonder, that people suffer, when there is so little need, when an effort of will and some hard work would bring them from their misery into peace and contentment.
We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.
I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.
I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.
I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.
A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.
I can't bring myself to trust you. But even if you were to betray me, and even if you were to become my enemy... would it be okay for me to love? Could you... let me love you?
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.
I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills.
Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.
I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.
Things can never be as they were. It's astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature.
I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.