Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.
I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.
I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.
What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.
Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.
Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.
I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.
Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.
Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.
I woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.
I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn't believe that, about other possibilities?
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.
In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.
It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.