Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.
In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.
To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.
No man commits evil for the sake of it; even the Devil himself has some farther design in sinning, than barely the wicked part of it.
Having spent alarmingly large chunks of my life studying the white side of the Open Sicilian, I find myself asking, why did I bother?
It was in a grim room on Eddy Street that I finally opened 'A Moveable Feast.' I read it all overnight. I read it again the next day.
I think storytelling is all about children. We human beings love to hear stories being told - and it first happens when you're a kid.
With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.
I like to think of the senses as having a volume control in the brain. The volume turns up on all the other senses when you lose one.
Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.
Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.
I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?
It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
I'm not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I'm not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.
It is the leader's role to lift followers out of their everyday selves up to a higher level of awareness, motivation, and commitment.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
Stress is caused by our resistance to what already is. Even our difficulties we need to accept. My greatest wish is to do God's will.
I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".
SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom.
Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning.
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.
Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts.
I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.
Juvenile delinquency serves many purposes, including that of providing sadistic adults with fantasies suited to their special tastes.
I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.
...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.
Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.
I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.
Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
Today's multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they'd like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.
A school is a place through which you have to pass before entering life, but where the teaching proper does not prepare you for life.
I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.
I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they're very easy to trace; they're very easy to tap.
A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
I was born in an Ilokano village called Cabugawan. Most of the houses in it were roofed with thatch, pan-aw, a species of wild grass.
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-lamps in the town.
Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
Most people are too silly to be truly interested in any thing. They herd together like cattle, and do not know what is good for them.
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.
Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated
It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world, to encompass the literature necessary for the information.
I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.