How do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.

You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.

People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going, or will he just fade away?

When a book is read an irrevocable thing happens — a murder, followed by an imposture. The story in the mind murders the story on the page, and takes its place.

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.

So far, she’d been her usual lame self: solitary and routine-loving, carefully avoiding any path that might lead to spontaneous human interaction. Lena Kaligaris

After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

One of the things that makes this show unique, in terms of an experience, is that when you do a show that has a large cast, scheduling is a very difficult thing.

When will the state of the country be sound?... When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.

When I was first asked for an autograph, I felt so uncomfortable that I just wrote, 'Tig's Autograph,' and from then on, that's what I write when I sign my name.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first.

[When I was a kid] I was a surgeon, amputating legs and arms of my paper dolls. And I had a little board with little tacks that I would tack them down to do this.

I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.

The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, Those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.

I am the living death, a Memorial Day on wheels. I am your Yankee Doodle Dandy, your John Wayne come home, your Fourth of July firecracker exploding in the grave.

I think I'll always want to write and direct. I'm interested in producing and helping other people tell stories. But I'm still in love with writing and directing.

If someone doesn't want me working their club, they're not going to hear from me again. I'm not going to fight or complain about it. I'd rather go someplace else.

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.

I went to Columbia film school; that's where I met Matthew Weisman. We then became writing partners, graduated, and moved out to Los Angeles. I didn't know a soul.

My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature

I like revising much, much better than getting down a first draft. The first draft is just getting the pieces to the puzzle. Then I get to put the puzzle together!

I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'

'Bridesmaids,' I think, opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. It was kind of like an arrival moment.

Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong.

There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.

Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

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