Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'
Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.
Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.
Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.
You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.
It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.
Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.
California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.
I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.