Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.
One can only know as much as one has lived to know, though it is certainly possible to learn a great deal less than this.
I'm a big people pleaser; I had a very awkward adolescence. Part of me is still that person who wants everyone to like me.
Belief in God is an elementary form of selflessness - the acknowledgement of responsibility toward a hypothetical 'Other'.
The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.
Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.
You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel.
A good many established writers seem to have the feeling that some day they are going to be found out, revealed as frauds.
I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.
A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
A camel is a horse designed by a committee and a committee's a sweet running piece of machinery compared to any government.
In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.
Vampires are handy characters, as they can do double duty as monster/villains and the classic, misunderstood romantic hero.
What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
Even a cursory run through American history shows exceptionalism has been used to justify bloodshed, oppression, and profit.
Can we ever really know anyone well? Lets just say we often found ourselves in each others company and neither of us minded.
Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.
I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.
It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.
The New Deal saved capitalism - saved it from the big-time capitalists - though many of the big-timers didn't see it that way.
Can we ever really know anyone well? Let's just say we often found ourselves in each other's company and neither of us minded.
I started writing 'God's War' knowing that I wanted to write about real people on a resource-strapped planet at perpetual war.
Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.
Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.
Historically, science-fiction and fantasy literature is no stranger to controversy, but it has learned how to adapt and endure.
I know about various fictional and folkloric vampire mythoses the way other people know about the personal life of celebrities.
I wake when my wife wakes, at 7:30 A.M. I'd like to sleep longer, but she has to go off to work, and I'd be plagued with guilt.
I think humor is like a shield that lets you get as close to the sad sad flame as possible - far closer, oftentimes, than drama.
The amazing thing now is that most of those so-called critics who were telling me to find my own voice seem to have lost theirs.
I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect.
My childhood was defined by my father's absence. His presence looms so large. Up until the age of 18, he was a superstar for me.
I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.
In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion.
I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.
Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result.
I think there's only one reason to write in any genre or to any particular age group: You are called to it. You think it'd be fun.
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it.
Canadian is both harder and easier to explain. Nobody knows what it is even supposed to be, let far-out-alone what it actually is.
The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.
In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.
Pen names have always fascinated me, in part because I understand the professional and economic and even societal reasons to do so.
If you compromise, and then you succeed, that's another kind of feeling. But if you compromise and fail, it's two failures at least.
There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.
We think a person should do right because it's right, not because their soul will be in eternal jeopardy if they don't toe the line.
Sometimes I wonder if, instead of falling madly in love, we should aspire to fall sanely in love. But then, what would be the point?