Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.
I write in all sorts of places; it's a legacy of my time as a journalist, where I could turn out copy in a hotel corridor. But I have a little office that I rent in my local town, and that's my ideal place.
Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.
And then Mircea finally let me down, only to get his hands inside the coat and push me against the wall. "I'm dirty," I protested. He waggled his eyebrows. "Promise?" "Mircea!" I laughed in spite of myself.
The most temptation I'd experienced had been with Tomas, the Senate's spy who had been feeding off me without permission, and Mircea, who was probably plotting some nefarious scheme. I have no taste in men.
My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.
My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him.
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didnt have any phone service and we didnt have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
Fabio Celon did send me pages as he progressed, both in black and white and some color samples as well. It was really exciting to see the sketches and to see the story [The Kite Runner] shaping up visually.
I admit I have no forgiveness. If anyone is ever rude to me, however much they may try to make up, I can't bring myself to re-establish the old [connection]. And when they drop me, I have a sense of relief.
Where's the course called How to Lead a Life of Crime? That's what this is about, isn't it? You've got everyone thinking this is the best school in the country, but it's really just a Hogwarts for hustlers.
Progress makes us lose the feeling of a ceremony that cooking should have. It has significantly shifted our values so that now it seems to us that only activities with an economic reward are worth pursuing.
I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.
It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there.
The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.
It was so silly to try to define things by words. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn't be tidied away with neat little labels." - Lena Gray
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.
I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.
Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.
I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females, it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist.
I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.
'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.
It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.
The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.
Life was messy. Always had been and always would be and that was just the way it was, so why bother complaining? You either did something about it or you didn’t, and then you lived with the choice you made.
but she realized that she wanted him to know her. She wanted him to understand her, if only because she had strange sense that he was the kind of man she could fall in love with, even if she didn't want to.
It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.
Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.
There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.
The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
If the Americans would only take all the money they have spent on this war (Iraq), and spend it like Soros has done on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have wonderful results.
I consider myself Istanbul's storyteller. My subject matter is my town. I consider it my job to explore the hidden patterns of my city's clandestine corners, its shady, mysterious places, the things I love.
The first interviews I gave were entirely unpleasant. You have people trying to trip you up with impolite questions that have nothing to do with the books. It's simply vulgar curiosity, and I won't have it.
There comes a time in every man's life when he wakes up drunk on the toilet and begins to doubt the choices he has made. and when that time comes at least twice a day, every day. something needs to be done.
We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.
I didn't want readers to think I was asking to be praised for taking care of my wife while she was ill. Lots of people are heroic, more heroic than I was, when faced with the suffering of someone they love.
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
Afterward I told his widow, "Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.' I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry." He did not say what the best way was.
Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.