Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.
Sit here long enough you get to know everything. You listen, see ?" She taps the side of her head. "Nobody listens any more. Everyone knows what they want to hear, but nobody actually listens.
I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.
When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.
Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts.
Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.
Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages.
She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all .
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
I'm not alone in having obese people in my circle and in my family. I have loved morbidly obese people, and I don't approach obesity with revulsion or judgment but with empathy and compassion.
The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING.
Trophy hunters are not Everyman. These world-traveling endangered-species shooters are a far cry from the hunters who spend weekends in the American outback near their suburban or rural homes.
We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.
Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.
L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.
Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.
Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.
The only thing which can keep journalism alive - journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment - is - again the Stevensonian secret! - charm.
Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.
I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just- didn't- have it.
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
I live in a little suburb close to Kansas City called Prairie Village, where there's a feeling of everybody knowing everybody else. I think the same thing is true of New York City, by the way.
The universe is always speaking to us... sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.
I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
But when the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Galatians 5:22
Jamie: "I didn't want anybody to be weird around me." Landon: "Including me?" Jamie: "Especially you! You know, I was getting along with everything fine. I accepted it, and then you happened!"
As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.
People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.
The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.
I think it's horrible that we Turks are always seen under the aspect of Islam first. I am constantly asked about religion, and almost always with a negative undercurrent that makes me furious.
Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.
This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.
The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.
I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
I woke up in Australia almost every day for the first 47 years of my life. When I left, I didn't discard that, didn't reject that, didn't forget that. Not even New York City can wipe that out.
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.
I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me, so I lit a candle and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep.
Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.
One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.