Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's surprising how soon you can get used to having money. It's much easier than getting used to not having it.
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
Let’s just put it this way: if you think there’s a thing – anything – women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.
Watching the progression and backlash against feminism even since 1970 will give you a serious case of whiplash.
It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.
Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.
when married people begin to talk about their rights, it means something has gone pretty far wrong between them.
When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
Aggressiveness is good in a combat leader. Combining that with ambition and insecurity becomes more problematic.
Obama was elected on the shoulders of an incipient movement that he allowed to languish once he became president.
Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.
Usha had said that males were not all that different, just bigger outside to make up for what they lacked within.
'Granted' is about a lively young woman who does a fairy godmother a good turn and is given a wish as her reward.
I don't pay much mind to politricks. Never met a politician who wouldn't try to convince you that salt was sugar.
Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.
if you cannot get what you want, common sense suggests that you should put your mind to wanting what you can get.
My characters are not underachievers; they aspire to great things, but they are limited by the world around them.
It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.
Don't ever sell mankind short by saying there's anything he can't do, ever, or anything that he isn't going to do.
I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.
I have had periods when I've overused a word, 'candent' being one example, but I'm trying not to do that any more.
It's amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.
I had been in a professional boys' choir, and as a boy soprano, you're aware that your voice has an expiration date.
I don't consider myself attractive. I'm an academic, and in academia, people will write you off if you look younger.
Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
One cannot withdraw from the life of the community. Injury to one member of it cannot fail to be the concern of all.
Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.
As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.
Environmentalism is not about the environment. It is about people. It is about a vision for a better life-for people.
That's really what the mall is all about: money. At the mall the rule is: Credito, ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am.
The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.
Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.
I don't really believe in the Devil, but if the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he certainly invented the Internet.
From the start, Trump's rallies had the air of the tent revival, that same hot thrum of militant exorcism and ecstasy.
We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.
Talent on its own sat gracefully only on the very young. After a certain age it was what you did with it that counted.
Ive been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder.
I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!
Why should I bring happiness to those I loathe by obliterating myself, when I can make them miserable just by existing?
We presuppose two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that man can learn it.
I've heard a lot of editors and agents say, "If the book is good, it will get published." I totally disagree with that.
I've been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder.
Cancer is the emergent property of the accumulated errors in an ordered system. It's the consequences of random events.
When I left the state of Maine for college, I met my first really rich friends, and I discovered summer could be a verb.
In the arsenal of the phony, the politics of God is one of the deadliest punches to the sweet spot of the American mind.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass - Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman.
There are infimal readers, readers who want to read the same book over and over, but will never read the same book twice.
The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system.
I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.