Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.
Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?