Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.
We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.
Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!
I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.
Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.
If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.
Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.
Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.
Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.
The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.
Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.
I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.
Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.
Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver's test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught.
I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.
Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.
Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.
I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.