Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.
Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.
When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.