Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
History is the lies of the victors.
The more you learn, the less you fear.
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Every love story is a potential grief story.
Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.
I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.
..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.