Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye.
In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.
I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.
Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.
We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.
There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.
It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.
I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.
My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.
Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?
Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'
It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.
I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.
We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.
We don't ruminate during a fight. Maybe in a bath, or driving a car, or as we take a walk. But not right smack in the middle of a dramatic moment.
My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.
I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.
There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.
If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.
This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]
Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.
It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.
Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!
I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.
I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."
The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
When we reach reflexively for something to dull an ache inside of us, in that very moment of reaching, we are hiding from our pain. We're storing it away. Tamping it down.
When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.
As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?
Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there's so much freedom in getting to know what's under there, the bedrock.
I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.
Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.
I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write.
There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.
I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan.
I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art
If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.
I was raised in an orthodox Jewish home where it was expected that, as a woman, I'd marry an investment banker, raise kids in the suburbs and go to temple. I wasn't raised to set the world on fire.
I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.
When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.
When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.
There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.