Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.
I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.
I read a lot of 'The Canterbury Tales' on my phone last year, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.
It's almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there's really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn't mean there will be a tomorrow.
I had it all wrong," he says. "Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn't. To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for.
I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.
In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Useless to worry until we find outselves blocked. ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.
Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.
Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.
What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?
What I tend to tell my students is, “When you look in the mirror and see a smart, angry girl who wants to be free, you're seeing a paradigm that Kathy [Acker] helped bring into the recognizable.”
Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.
Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.
Whatever the explanation, it's perfectly obvious that our educational system has nothing to do with education: it's a babysitting service designed to replicate the worst qualities of the parents.
Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.
Time does not act on memory to soften the edges, blur the details; if anything, it sharpens them. Emotions may lose their acid outlines, but not places and people, not if you wish to retain them.
Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.
I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
I don't have a definition for depression. I'm productive, and that's not a sign of depression, right? And I don't have weeks where I don't leave my bed. It seems like depressed people have those.
Seamen three! what men be ye? Gotham's three Wise Men we be. Whither in your bowl so free? To rake the moon from out the sea. The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine, And our ballast is old wine.
All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
I just happen to comprehend the low standards of the majority of the music-buying public, and I don’t care how condescending that sounds, it’s true. They always go for the shiny gimmicks. Always.
I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it.
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
We kiss again and this time, it feels familiar. I know exactly how we fit together, his arm around my waist, my hands on his chest, the pressure of his lips on mine. We have each other memorized.
Every tattoo I got with them is a mark of their friendship, and almost every time I have laughed in this dark place was because of them. I don’t want to lose them. But I feel like I have already.
If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling - or reading!
As for what I listen to after writing, it could be anything - but I've noticed that if the current book contains music from one tradition, it is music from another tradition that most relaxes me.
Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.
There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
I don't know how many lions and leopards I've shot. I've shot two elephants, which was enough - never again. It's a melancholy and moving thing to hunt an elephant. It's like shooting an old man.
The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.
I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?
I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.
Writing has made me rich-not in money but in a couple hundred characters out there, whose pursuits and anguish and triumphs I've shared. I am unspeakably grateful at the life I have come to lead.
Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
But I don't fit. Your family hates me. I make your life difficult." That's where she was wrong. "No, You're my family. And as for making my life difficult, you, Blaire Wynn, make my life complete.
It didn't mean forever but for right now I wanted Rush to be my first. He wouldn't be my last. A stop I might never forget or get over. That was what scared me the most. Not being able to move on.
When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.
If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.