Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.
My mother raised me very clearly that if you cross the street, you will die. If you go outside, you will die. If you play sports, you will likely die. That's what I was getting at home.
I hardly grew up mono-lingually! I was raised religious, so there's a tradition of semi-access to a second language. When I learned my ABCs, they taught us our Aleph-Bet at the same time.
I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.
White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.
What it takes to survive out here is order, I realize and say to myself, ‘Divide the day into equal periods. See this travel alarm? You get up, don your uniform, move according to the bell.’
The truth is that much of the plastic surgery we see today has a racial or ethnic component because it has to do with inherently racial concepts of physical perfection, like the 'Roman nose.'
Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.
Of all evil-doers, the American is most to be feared. He uses more ingenuity in the planning of his projects and will take greater risks in carrying them out than any other malefactor on earth.
It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.
There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.
I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.
I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.
You don't really have a story until you discover the moment when the pressures on a character force a sudden, abrupt shift in direction and she falls through the net that has so far held her in place.
I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities.
When I was living in Jerusalem, I used to write in a coffee shop called Tmol Shilshom. I'd sit at the same table every day and work. And right next to my seat was a weathered wingback chair by a window.
Howard's enchanting Hospice obeys its own magical inner logic with excellent prose and a sadness that will split open hearts. You have in your hands a story that is inquisitive, gripping, and triumphant.
I'm just very interested, fascinated, heartbroken, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and our need to find peace on that front... Everyone's always, like, victim and avenger at the same time.
I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so deterministic, which was germane to the story's concerns.
Her theme was happiness: what it was; what it was not; where we might find it, where not; and how, if found, it must be guarded. Never must we confound it with pleasure. Nor think sorrow its exact opposite.
Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.
I'm writing a novel about the Syrian war. It will be completely different from my short stories. I have to address my feelings directly because I cannot avoid the war. It's something in my soul, in my blood.
Every book is vulnerable, and every book is nerve-wracking, but I've never been both so excited and terrified to have a book coming into the world. It's an expressly loaded subject, one on which you can't win.
I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.
When you're in a world, and your parents are one way, and you're told, 'This is how the whole world is, and this is how you're supposed to be,' and you're terribly unhappy in that world, it's a very scary thing.
When you have a goal to reach, you will be strong automatically. And you will be patient automatically. If you don't have a goal, your life will be a disaster. You will lose yourself and you will lose your soul.
There's an Armed Forces Haggadah and an Alcoholics Anonymous Haggadah and an LGBT Haggadah. Some people make a new Haggadah every year. It's a real living document... They're just constantly made throughout time.
I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.
I think the computer is a hindrance to good writing because it is so tempting to leave what you've written. If you use a typewriter, you must retype if you make a mistake, and thus, you must re-examine every word.
I love the way a story's ending can force you to read backwards. It's as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colored crystals suddenly falls into a beautiful symmetrical pattern.
The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."
My best advice for you, honey, is to stop if you possibly can! And if you just can’t, then get ready to work like hell. Hang onto your day job. And remember, you may not make a living, but you’ll make a wonderful life.
I have written some stories about weakness. I believe that punishment for a weak man is doubled. So when I feel upset, I always try to fool myself and say to myself, I have to be patient because I have a goal to reach.
Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.
The Israel Palestine thing, there are infinite sides to each side, but if we stick to the main sides, everybody's in the same boat and it's maddening to me for people not to understand what's in both their best interest.
It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.
I want to be funny. When I first started writing, I didn't find my stories funny, but people kept saying they were. It kind of worried me; these are some pretty disturbing and sad pieces. Why do people think they're funny?
Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.
The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form.
Weakness is worse than cancer, I think. It's a kind of psychological or spiritual cancer. And if you have a goal in your life, you'll get psychological immunity. Psychological immunity is a kind of optimism, just like spring.
We live in an age that's very suspicious of preachy political rhetoric, which means that there's room for art that approaches these issues from the side - as satire, as parody, or as a kind of outlandish speculative proposition.
At the beginning of the Syrian conflict, I was optimistic. But now, I'm pessimistic, because it's so complicated. It's much worse than before. The whole world is fighting inside of Syria. It will take years and years to resolve.
You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.
I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified.
Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.
It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.
I was afraid that something would happen to me. But at the same time I was lucky, because some writers were tortured and jailed. I always used metaphors that could be interpreted in more than one way. Maybe this style protected me.
I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.
The silver friend knows your present and the gold friend knows all of your past dirt and glories. Once in a blue moon there is someone who knows it all, someone who knows and accepts you unconditionally, someone who is there for life.
When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.