Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.
As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.
Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.
China will consider herself fortunate if she succeeds in keeping herself intact and is not dismembered or partitioned among the European powers that are colonizing the continent of Asia.
Men," he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully. "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.
If you look at the world one way, it takes from you - it's a thief of time, energy, creative mojo. But if you look at the world another way, it gives you an endless supply of motivation.
What conflicting ideas that we love and embrace these women, and entrust them to raise our children and to feed us and to bathe us, but we keep something as silly as a bathroom separate.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
There are, however, those who have called the book [The Kite Runner] divisive and objected to some of the issues raised in the book, namely racism, discrimination, ethnic inequality etc.
Obama's middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah, too? Do McCain and Palin think there's something wrong with my name?
Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.
There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.
As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.
It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.
You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.
The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.
I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
There's one thing that always interests me about you good people, not your certainty that the rest of us are swine, - no doubt we are, - but your certainty that your opinions are pearls.
I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.
I used to write in bed, starting when I woke up. I believe that creative work comes from our subconscious mind, so I try to keep the gap between sleep and writing as minimal as possible.
People promise to stick with their spouse 'for richer or poorer' but it's the 'for poorer' part that causes the worry. The big shock is that the 'for richer' bit can also cause problems.
it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.
I thought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.
Not a single illegal immigrant should or need enter the United States, not one. Contrary to the common wisdom, the borders are easy to seal, and controlling entry is hardly totalitarian.
I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What's wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don't.
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.
If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
I'd always thought I would feel like an animal released from its cage when my student days were finished, I felt more like a bird that had been pushed from its nest and told it must fly.
It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.
Let it all out. If only I could. Letting it all out would involve me exploding like a firework, a beautiful riot of rainbow sparks bouncing around the car and lighting up the entire lot.
I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,--fond of enjoying the present, careless of the future; his conversation that of a man of sense, his actions those of a fool.
I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.
. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.
As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don't want to be taught lessons, and I don't want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome.
You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.
Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.
When we listen to the radio, look at television and read the newspapers we wonder whether universal education has been the great boon that its supporters have always claimed it would be.
It is no more rational to have lawyers in positions of power than it would be to have garbage collectors in positions of power. And in human terms garbage collectors would be preferable.
The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.
Americans continue to visit Paris not just for Paris, but for ‘Paris.’ As if out of some collective nostalgia for what Paris should be, more than what it is. For someone else’s memories.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.