Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Slurring is the cursive of speech.
Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?
Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities.
I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.
That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.
Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
I've always loved reading manifestos. Collectively, they represent a triumph of style.
I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.
Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.
If you could relive one year in your life, which one would it be? [...] The upcoming one.
For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.
Learning dance steps was the sorry Saturday night pursuit of every boardinghouse girl in America.
I totally remember that: being 25 and unemployed and trying to stretch each cappuccino for 60 minutes.
All the historical elements should feel organic to the story but not hammered down to serve a purpose.
Be careful when choosing what you're proud of--because the world has every intention of using it against you
That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.
If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.
To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation.
I always thought I was a writer on the inside, but after a few years of not writing, you can't make that claim anymore.
I have been writing since I was a kid. I also traveled a good deal for my work and did extended stays in places like Geneva.
If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us...then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.
As a youth, I always did a good deal of reading in the summer months, having suffered since birth from an allergy to athletic activity.
I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.
What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli.
I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.
It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.
As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.
Look at Snowden or Julian Assange. In their own way, they are free without restrictions. They are dropped in a place because of political reasons.
When I traveled professionally in Europe, I would inevitably spend a weekend at the Hotel Costes around the corner from the Place Vendome in Paris.
As a traveler, I should probably count myself fortunate to be living in the jet age, and as an author, I know I am lucky to have a book tour at all.
Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.' 'I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.
My personal challenge as an artist has been having a day job which is intellectually satisfying and fun - and thus can easily supplant the desire to make art.
Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.
By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.
My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was 30 because she was having too much fun to settle down.
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.
You can build a place that is beautiful, but nobody feels comfortable sitting in it, and the kids aren't allowed to go into many of the rooms. Or a place can look lived in, but it doesn't please the eye.
In 1989, I had a fellowship to teach for Yale in China for two years. I came back from California to New Haven to spend the summer learning Chinese, but because of Tiananmen Square, Yale cancelled the program.
I had a 20-year career. I have two children. The advantage of writing later in my life is that I already had a whole mature realm of accomplishments and responsibilities, an identity outside of being a writer.
When I sat down to write 'Rules of Civility,' I didn't write it for anybody but myself. I wasn't trying to make my mark or make money. I wasn't anxious about feeding my kids or whether my father would be proud of me.
I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.
I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.
Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities.
For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.
I prefer to put myself in an environment that's further afield and look through the eyes of someone who differs from me in age, ethnicity, gender, and/or social class. I think a little displacement makes me a sharper observer.
When I was 10 years old, I threw a bottle with a note in it in the ocean in Massachusetts, and Harrison Salisbury found it and contacted me. We began a correspondence that lasted for years, and I eventually met him when I was 18.
Some writers such as John Cheever and Raymond Carver seem to draw artistic energy from analyzing the realm of their own experiences - their social circles and memories and mores. I'm one of those who draw creative energy from the opposite.
I suppose we don't rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment-a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.