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All Quotes Collection
"Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly."
44
"Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me."
46
"I have the worst ear for criticism; even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle who says she doesn't like blue."
64
"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
51
"Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash."
45
"San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities."
65
"Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore."
47
"I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works."
54
"I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around."
42
"Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits."
39
"There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect."
44
"When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days."
33
"While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story."
35
"I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target."
34
"It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant."
33
"If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that."
72
"Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that."
47
"I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now."
45
"It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that."
38
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend."
29
"As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything."
29
"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."
37
"I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep."
40
"Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more."
37
"For too long, our country's version of an energy policy has consisted of Americans waking up every day and wondering how much it will cost to drive to work, how much it will cost to keep their business running, how much it will cost to heat or cool their homes."
40
"Americans are paying for our lack of an energy policy with their jobs and out of their pocketbooks."
35
"Terri's death brings to a close a very tragic, human and personal event that has left everyone with a feeling of emptiness, regardless of what side of the issue you may have been on."
48
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