Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.
We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.
Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.
I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.
Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.
A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.
The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.
I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.
Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.
I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.
I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.
I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.
If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.
A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.
I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.
I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'
Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.
I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.
We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.
The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.
Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.
Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?
The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.
Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.
I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.
Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.
A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.
My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.
If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.
The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.
I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs.
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.