Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing is such a solitary thing, so its nice, when Im discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.
The natural world is often bleak, but the language devoted to it is as careful as needlepoint and prophetic as well.
There's an enormous amount of obliviousness: a desire among young gentrifiers to see only the city they want to see.
Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.
Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.
I'd say that in place of a singular phobic-level terror, I keep a whole collection of running, yet manageable, fears.
No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another
Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.
I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
Superstition? Who can define the boundary line between the superstition of yesterday and the scientific fact of tomorrow?
I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.
I have a skepticism toward romance. I believe that decency and companionship are, in the long run, more important in life.
It's difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which you're disguising your origins in which someone doesn't get hurt.
My mind is just as open as it ever was, professor. But it's a scientific mind, and there's no place in it for superstitions.
So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.
I think too many people edit themselves way too soon. There's plenty of time to edit, and it is a crucial part of it all, too.
There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.
I lived in Jerusalem with the Temple Mount as my holy site. My Palestinian neighbors lived in Al-Quds with the Haram al-Sharif.
...for chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.
I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.
When one writes, there’s the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.
With each book, I've found myself more and more able to draw off the personal and still be as vulnerable as I need to be as a writer.
Sometimes I do feel like I write the same story again and again. And for me, I am always looking for a place with a kind of redemption.
There's no safety in anything, but in the arts, there is really this idea of no promises. I didn't follow the writing dream for safety.
I think it's very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic - though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this.
Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.
The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.
If you are going to be underestimated by people who speak more rapidly, the temptation is to speak slowly and strategically and outwit them.
Sometimes I feel like those born-again folk, always working on their faith, but I'm always working on my atheism. We all have our struggles.
I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.
I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible.
If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute.
I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.
I believe all stories are love stories, and there are kinds and kinds of love, so I will always write about love, but not necessarily romance.
You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.
In the late 1950s, self-esteem hadn't yet been invented. High schools saw their sole mission as preparing students thoroughly for academic work.
There's a lot of sympathy, but some people in America don't care. They think Syria is a very faraway place and that it's none of their business.
I think my love for rhythm in language comes from repeating the same words, the same sounds, over and over again day after day for so many years.
Art is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.
The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.
There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.
It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.
Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.
I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.
Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas.
Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.
What I'm trying to say is that a lot that lies behind being able to live the writing life is psychological and wrapped up in ideas of self-definition.