Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.
Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition.
Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.
When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
Don't you know yet that men are full of words that mean nothing? The silence of a woman is a thousand times weightier. You must learn to trust silence. To load it with truth, and to wait.
You," Said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want -- and what I want now is a drink.
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.
But Mary Elizabeth felt different. She kept saying it was an "articulate" film. So "articulate." And I guess it was. The thing is, I didn't know what it said even if it said it very well.
I'm not an expert or a trained ballistician. But it is a subject I've studied intently for 50 years, so I may know a thing or two. In my opinion, the JFK investigation was poorly handled.
At the age that I was when I stopped reading comics, and with a set of talents that would seem to mark a future comic-book auteur, my son has had only a passing enthusiasm for the medium.
If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.
Curious,” Bauchelain said. “What is it you wish us to do for you?” “Usurp the king,” Imid Factalo said. “Usurp, as in depose.” “Right.” “Depose, as in remove.” “Yes.” “Remove, as in kill.
Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge.
I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
Our political process appears to be a toxic dance of mutually assured destruction that takes all the citizens down with you, and that can't be right. So I've prepared a little experiment.
Surfing is one of the most joyful pursuits a human can take up. But there's no joy in a deadzone. If you've ever surfed in turds and medical waste you don't want to repeat the experience.
I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can.
There are those who stay at home and those who go away, and it has always been so. Everyone can choose for himself, but he must choose while there is still time and never change his mind.
I wish the night would end, I wish the day'd begin, I wish it would rain or snow, or the wind would blow, or the grass would grow, I wish I had yesterday, I wish there were games to play.
...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true.
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.
The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)
A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can't help looking like a sheep.
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.
A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
I believe in the immortality of the soul because I cannot conceive of an intelligent First Cause creating human beings through long process of evolution in this world only to destroy them.
When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that.
We think we know people. We think that what we see is all there is. We rarely ask ourselves what goes on behind the curtain. We jump to conclusions. And we take everything very personally.
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
She froze. He reached up and took her hand in his, pulling the knife away, making her drop it on the floor. "Show me how much you hate me," he whispered against her mouth. "Prove it to me.
What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.
As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.
We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its hape and its nature, we have to decide what we're going to do about that love on any given day.