Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
Plots are for dead people.
Literature, of course, is not a contest.
I wondered about the half-life of regret.
All the world's a stage we're going through.
I don't have a love life. I have a like life.
Most things good for writing are bad for life.
There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.
I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.
You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.
It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.
I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.
I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.
We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.
I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.
Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.
Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.
She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.'
I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.
I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.
Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'
I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.
