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Quotes by Novelist
"The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present."
6
"Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are."
6
"If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself."
6
"Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth."
6
"I held it up, and tried to channel happy dog thoughts toward Cerberus- Alpo commercials, cute little puppies, fire hydrants."
6
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."
6
"Two lives that once part are as ships that divide."
6
"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship."
6
"What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?"
6
"Oh, why had the Labyrinth brought me here?As soon as I thought this, I chided myself: Of course it would bring me where I least wanted to be. Austin had been wrong about the maze. It was still evil, designed to kill. It was just a little subtler about its homicides now."
6
"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."
6
"I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is."
6
"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that."
6
"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."
6
"Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest."
6
"I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there."
6
"He looked at his friend, perhaps for the last time, and said what he had always known, from the moment they'd met, when he'd understood that the prince was his brother in soul. "I love you."
6
"Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable."
6
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."
6
"My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy."
6
"There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities."
6
"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
6
"It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph."
6
"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
6
"A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected."
6
"But the main things about a man are his eyes and his feet. He should be able to see the world and go after it."
6
"My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind."
6
"There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet."
6
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