Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?
If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.
I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!
One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.
You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.
I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.
There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.
Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.
I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.
'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.
Not to brag, but I do think I've gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint... except that I can't figure out how to use Excel!
Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.
Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.
It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?
I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.
When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff
I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?
One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.
Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?
There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.
When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.
The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
I felt unbelievably lucky to have the success I did with 'Goon Squad,' and I also felt the pressure of how fleeting that success can be.
I've tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you're writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.
Criticism is fine and conversation is fine, but the person who's criticizing should know what they're saying and whom they're criticizing.
Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.
You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.
I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a brain-section issue.
I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.
I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.
What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.
Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.