Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.
Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?
For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.
And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.