Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are surrounded by story.
Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.
Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.
I have not won far more awards than I have won.
I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.
I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.
I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.
A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise.
I wouldn't want to tweet to anyone who would be interested in my tweets.
My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.
Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.
Family dynamics are true over time, across generations and different cultures.
I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
I'm not usually drawn to memoir - many run the risk of self-aggrandizement or score-settling.
A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.
I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap.
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.
Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.
I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.
I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.
Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity... my children aren't buying it.
We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!
At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
You're a human being, and every time a list of prize nominations comes out and your name isn't on it, you do have that thumb-in-the-eye feeling.
Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me.
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.
Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.
I love a well-plotted story. But I'm just not that kind of writer, and it's not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity.
All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.
Any adjective you put before the noun 'writer' is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it's feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.
For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution.
I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.
I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.