Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.
Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.
As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another.
Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases.
Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.
I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America's first planned communities, order and harmony are prized.
Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy and wears his egotism on his sleeve.
Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.
Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.
...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.
I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.
As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general.
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'
Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying.
The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.
Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.
At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.
A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.
Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
As a teenager, I ached to grow up even more than I dreaded to. I craved escape from my parents' impositions on what I believed.
Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.
Set a good example as parents, since the most convincing argument that a girl can become a computer coder is that her mother is one.
Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.
Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.
'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.
Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.
Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.
Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.
Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.