top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around."
Standard
Customized
More
"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The proper study of mankind is books."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
Writing
"It s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans."
Relationship
"There's no reason you should write any novel quickly."
Reason
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
Business
"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
Literature
"Good habits are worth being fanatical about."
Being
"Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home."
Grief
"People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.' And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness."
Humanity
"But good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive."
Relationship
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
Life
bottom of page