Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
A blind man can see how much I love you
I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.
Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.
The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo.
All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious.
There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.
they danced as though they'd been waiting all their lives for each song.
I find my readers to be very smart, and there is no reason to write dumb.
I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.
Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.
I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.
The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.
Aging is a chance to make what was good, great, and what was never so good, better...
I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.
The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.
Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.
Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.
My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.
I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.
There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
When I was a little girl, I thought I was Sydney Carton in Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' I don't think anyone else did.
I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.
If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.
I wasn't surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein's store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.
I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.
'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
Great sex is not a pleasant soak in the tub, with the scented candle burning. Great sex is more like a bomb exploding inside your right mind.
I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don't work at weekends.
Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.
For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.
We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating.
My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.
I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that.
I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves.
My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.
I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment.
The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.
The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.
As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being.
Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.
My grandmother tended to divide life into 'nice' and 'not so nice.' Life in America, her apartment, her grandchildren: 'nice'; life before 1915: 'not so nice.' That's all I heard.
I do have a sister. I have never written much about sisters before. I am very close to my sister, but, maybe, because we are very close, it never occurred to me to write about her.
I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has.
