Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To conform is to lose your soul
A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.
It is really irritating to work with irritating people
I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.
Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.
Things could be worse and things could be so much better.
I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.
I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.
The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.
Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.
It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.
I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.
We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.
A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.
That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.
Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.
Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.
All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.
We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.
If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?
We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.
One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.
We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.
My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.
I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.
We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.
You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.
I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.
We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.
Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.
After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.
I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.
There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens.
The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.
Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.
Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.
I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."
I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.
I don't actually think of the internet as the bad guy. I think of the internet as doing a hell of a lot of wonderful, fascinating, interesting things. A lot of information that's exchanged on the internet is extremely useful, and every once in a while it percolates up to knowledge. Wisdom is far harder to come by.
I can't trace thematic similarities between Then We Came To The End and The Unnamed to a life event; I think it's more just a natural progression as a writer. Everything changes in the second book - tonally, character-wise, situationally - and on top of that, I think I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it.
If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially.
I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.
The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.
Between the time I first started working in advertising in 1998 and now, the word brand has replaced identity. We are no longer individuals so much as we are brands. We're individual brands. Individuals are basically left to define their individuality by staying off the internet, which in and of itself can be a brand, the opting-out brand.
Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.
Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.
I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work.
Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.
She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind.