Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?
Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.
I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.
In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am.
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.
People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.
Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.
Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.
I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.