Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every seed has a story.
My mind is like a gyre and odd juxtapositions happen.
My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.
For the time being Words scatter Are they fallen leaves?
Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.
Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.
But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.
Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.
There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.
What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?
Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.
Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.
Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.
She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
Writing a book is a way of thinking to me, the only way of thinking that I have found successful.
language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.
Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!
No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.
There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.
It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.
I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.
Maybe all teenagers feel like they don't fit in. I never felt like a cool kid. I remember being bullied for being Asian.
An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.
I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.
I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.
The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity.
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.
For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.
The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.
Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.
A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.
I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.
When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
I live in a beautiful part of British Columbia, and I run through the rainforest. I do have to look over my shoulder to check for a cougar or a wolf though, so sometimes it's not the most relaxing.
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and its hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.