Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.
I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.
It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.
I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.
Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.
Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.
Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.
It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.
When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'