Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
I really do work in solitude.
Beauty alters the grain of reality.
All those layers of silence upon silence.
Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.
Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy
Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
