Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.
My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.
I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.
I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.
I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.
I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.
Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.
The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.
If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?
I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.
Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.
I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.
What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.
The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.
I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.
I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.
I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?
she was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway?
Once you get below the floor of our personal identities, we're all connected. Perhaps that's why we can move into others' lives.
She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.
I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.
Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.
A cliché is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.
This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.
My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.
I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.
The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?
If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.
The night crackled ... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.
She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.
It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.
I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress
Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.
Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?
Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.
It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.