Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to.
Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.
It's very important for a writer to be unnoticed, as quiet and unnoticed as possible.
There is nothing more difficult than simplicity, and therefore, nothing more refined.
Educate a man and you educate an individual. Educate a woman and you educate a family.
One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
Convalescence is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.
To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.
Building a dollhouse is a lot like writing a novel because you are God of the Universe.
It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.
I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.
When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.
Tony Judt's remarkable 'The Memory Chalet' was written from the prison of mute immobility.
I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.
The ordinary experiences of aging alter and clarify your view of past, present, and future.
Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world.
I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?
Life is not easy. Life is very harsh. We have to be strong. Otherwise, life will destroy us.
Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.
All a person does in a moment of suffering is to suffer. There is not room for anything else.
I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.
It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.
Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.
Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.
The present moment is ever the critical time. The future is merely for intelligent forethought.
I'm kind of in love with my theater agent. I'm a true naive about the theater, a total innocent.
I know a lot of single people who are not miserable as society tells them they're supposed to be.
You know, happiness isn't a permanent state. Neither is unhappiness. There's a flow, back and forth
The whole creative process...is putting opposites together into something that wasn't there before.
There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.
The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.
To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death.
Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.
My joy as a writer is circling around and around and down and down to find out who the real person is.
Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.
Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.
The universe is bound by unseen threads. We have only to untangle them a little to see a pattern unfold.
All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer.
I wanted to publish a book simply to be buried with it; that's all I wanted. I had no ambition beyond that.
By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.
I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.
I was quite satisfied with my creative life. I've always had reinforcement from a small but devoted readership.
Every nation should wrestle with the question of what it means to defend itself, what it means to take revenge.
I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes.
What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?
I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.
I wrote in the cellar for a number of years. I needed a private space, and it had a furnace, so it was always warm.
God will not damn a lunatic's soul. He knows that the powers of evil are too great for those of us with weak minds.
A defeated nation is always explaining itself. That's why the best storytellers are always from vanquished nations.
I love those books and movies where someone turns because they're blackmailed or they're passed over for promotion.