Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later.
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.
Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.
Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.
The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.
The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.
--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?
I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really.
There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.
Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.
For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.
Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.
I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface