Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.
I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.
You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.
To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love
We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.
As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people.
I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.
Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.
What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.
You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.
I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.
There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.
Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.
The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.
Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?
They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.
Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.