Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
I have been shown so much kindness in my life, so for me to write books about good, kind people seems completely natural.
You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.
I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.
It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.
I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.
The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.
I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.
Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."
No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.
But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
You learn every time you write a book, and then you take that new knowledge and experience into the next book. Hopefully, every time, you raise the bar.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
I've never had a terrible job. I've been a cook, waitress, bookseller, teacher, freelance writer. I know what the bad jobs are, and I haven't done them.
If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.
The '70s were a different time as far as parenting was concerned. People left their kids in the car with the windows cracked while they went to the grocery store.
No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
I've been writing the same book my whole life - that you're in one family, and all of a sudden, you're in another family, and it's not your choice, and you can't get out.
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.
I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.
I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.
I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn't the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.
The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.
I had a real computer solitaire problem. I'd gotten to the point where I had to win a game before I could write, and each time I got up to get a cup of water, I had to win a game. It was a nightmare.
He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.