Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.
Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.
All you can do is focus on telling the best story you can with compelling characters. If you do it right, it will endure. If you do it wrong, it won't.
He was as noble and fair in face as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.
Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.
There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.
I'm not afraid of silence. You know, I'm not afraid to sit in a room and have the conversation drop into silence. I think that's a very southern thing.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
If you real desire is to be good, there is no need to wait for the money before you do it; you can do it now, this very moment, and just where you are.
A man remains ignorant because he loves ignorance, and chooses ignorant thoughts; a man becomes wise because he loves wisdom and chooses wise thoughts.
He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.
In Lilly's eyes her beautiful clear water eyes there is what I have sought and never found, wanted and never had, hoped for and never discovered. Love.
One of the beautiful and terrible things about America is you can go there and still be whatever you want, if you bust your ass and you have some luck.
Distance sometimes endears friendships, and sweetens it - for separation from those we love shows us, by the loss, their real value and dearness to us.
When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.
Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field.
The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
I'd spent a night with Ranger a while ago, and I knew what happened when he was encouraged. Ranger knew how to make a woman want him. Ranger was magic.
By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .
Oh, those golden-yellow eyes of the wolf! You can feel yourself being pulled in. I knew I had been accepted - and that I had spoken to another species.
There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.
Once I became the editor of the school newspaper, I had a key to the school, and I went to the school cafeteria and just took the food they threw away.
My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.
But just because you bury something, that doesn't mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they'd been there all along. All that time. I had to face it.
I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.
I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.
Obviously Feministing is kind of a women's space in a certain way, even though we have a lot of male readership and people who don't identify as women.
Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.
Where there is love, do what you will, it will be right action. It will never bring conflict to one's life. In the flame of love, all fear is consumed.
Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love.
If you have a great many desires, you will gradually eliminate them one by one, until you allow certain desires to dominate and the others to die away.
There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.
There are few mortals so insensible that their affections cannot he gained by mildness, their confidence by sincerity, their hatred by scorn or neglect
Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.
The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.
The words you've bandied are sufficient; 'Tis deeds that I prefer to see. [Ger., Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, Lasst mich auch endlich Thaten sehn.]
God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.
The safest thing is always to try to convert everything that is in us and around us into action; let the others talk and argue about it as they please.
All rights and laws are still transmitted, Like an eternal sickness to the race. [Ger., Es erben sich Gesetz and Rechte Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort.]
Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.
Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.
Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.
I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.
I was so ashamed of who I was. And I also felt like an outcast in gay society as well because I wasn't good-looking enough; my body wasn't good enough.
I feel like, every single decision I make and every single album I make, it's all about letting go. Letting go of the past and just getting on with it.
There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.