Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.
I really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
My nature is feminist. How could you not be a feminist and be alive? The world is full of brilliant, interesting women.
I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.
I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.
I'm quite good on the harmonica and can get a tune out of most musical instruments, so long as the tune is 'Oh Susannah.'
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
I don't have a night stand. If I read at night in bed or too close to sleep-time, I lie awake thinking in the dark for hours.
I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.
I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'
If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.
We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning family structure around me - and yet I could free myself from it.
Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.
The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.
The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.
When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.
People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.
The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.
Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.
We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer,' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.
You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.
How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.
What I know most is that the difference between us is what makes us interesting and attractive and problematic and exciting and vital to each other. Give me difference over indifference any day.
Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.
What are we doing in the world that we are denying people the right to an open education? And we are denying it by making education something you have to pay for so drastically. How are people supposed to afford this?