Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Love is a powerful painkiller.
Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
The market is the only critic that matters.
Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.
I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.
Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it.
I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.
Uncertainty doesn't make life worth living, quite, but it does make striving and gambling worth attempting.
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.
The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.
The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.
Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.
Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?
Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
The future of time, of how it's won or lost, endured or enjoyed, expanded or compressed, will depend on how it's valued, not how it's measured.
Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.
In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human.
People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late.
Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason.
Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.
Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.
Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.
E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.