Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm homesick. But I cannot go back to Syria. I lost everything. And I'm against the Syrian regime, so there is no way to go back. I'm really homesick.
Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.
I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me.
When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.
Steve Yarbrough is a masterful storyteller-one of our finest-and Safe from the Neighbors is a masterpiece. . . . This is a spellbinding, powerful novel.
If you can capture a womans imagination, then you will have her. But imagination is a strange creature. It needs time and distance to function properly.
For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.
Publishers are humane men, and rarely commit crimes. Authors, however, are a hardened set, who usually perpertrate a felony every time they issue a book.
I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'
I'd chosen to dedicate my life to writing, and I asked myself, 'if you write your whole life, and nobody ever sees a word, is it as a writer that you die?'
I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not.
You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.
Despite everything - despite all this hatred, despite all this misunderstanding between nations and civilizations - I think love is the end. Love is the end.
I know nobody believes in peace anymore, but what else is there to work toward? As the years have gone by, peace seems like more and more of an impossibility.
I wanted impossible things. I wanted my life with her before it all turned bad. What I had been given had been taken away and now I was even less than before.
You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.
There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color.
I thought that we were all like trees, flexible youths, saplings, who grow up heavy and stiff, spread seeds and get chopped down and turned into notebook paper.
There are no great fanfares for the truly great moments of your life. Just dripping taps and the sound of your own footsteps, walking from one room into another
There's no rule I want to break or ever wanted to break - I find the conventional life gratifying - as long as I can sit at my typewriter, alone, for half a day.
Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
Palestine isn't a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it's a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country, for the purpose of war.
I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.
It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.
But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.
For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.
There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.
As a writer, my weapon is my pen. I want to create more awareness about the people in Syria. This is the most important issue: protecting civilians in this crazy war.
It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.
One of the reasons people like romances is that they're artificially shaped to give a pattern and meaning. It's not as messy as everyday life or as difficult or thorny.
I decided I like that mode. It's how I think - it's my voice. I like being funny and sad at the same time, or funny and disturbing at the same time. It's my natural voice.
I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.
Architecture is undistinguished, sometimes derelict, but occasionally, as in 'Post and Beam,' there is something arresting in a setting... the building behind the Cathedral.
The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.
I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.
I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.
It's one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn't it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power.
Behind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.
Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.
Human experience is infinite. Lives are infinite. Stories are infinite. Just because one story has gravity in it doesn't mean you can't write a different one with gravity in it.
The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything thats eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy
I spent my whole childhood being told, 'Israel is surrounded by enemies who are trying to push it into the sea.' But can't Gaza feel the same way? Personally, I'm frozen in time.
I write in Arabic and prefer writing my stories by hand. I need a cup of tea or coffee when I write. When I was in Syria, I was addicted to tea, but now I'm addicted to Starbucks.
To tell an adult exactly what steps to take towards his salvation was apt to weaken him. It deprived him of his inalienable right to trial and error which was tonic to the character.
The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.
As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.
We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.
Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.
I once had a story editor ask me not to use the word 'placenta.' I wanted to say: 'Now tell me again how you got here?' Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.