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Quotes by Novelist
"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
"I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability."
6
"The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author."
6
"Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision."
6
"I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?"
6
"What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil."
6
"People usually asked her if she had a belly button. Of course she had a belly button. She couldn't explain how. She didn't really want to know."
6
"To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes."
6
"It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be."
6
"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."
6
"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention."
6
"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
6
"In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern."
6
"Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?"
6
"Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can."
6
"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
6
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