Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All we have is the story we tell.
You have to do disappointment twice.
I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.
What business does memory have with time?
No one gets to tell you what your life means!
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
The form is so malleable and can do so many things.
I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.
With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way.
I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.
I come from a newspaper background, so maybe Im attuned to current events.
I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?
I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.
There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.
Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.
His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.
If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.
The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.
I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.
He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?
I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.
He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there.
The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.
There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.
And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.
Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.
He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.
Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.
I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.
I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.
A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.
At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?
You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.
The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.
If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out.
My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.
Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.
Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.
Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.
My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.