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Quotes by Novelist
"As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless - and absolutely essential."
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"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
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"I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea."
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"If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye."
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"A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway."
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"A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader."
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"The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian."
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"How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning?"
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"She also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good."
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"He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood."
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"Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one."
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"I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else."
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"It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!"
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"Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions."
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"There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime."
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"Mine first --mine last-- mine even in the grave!"
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"Stop running from me and listen. I do want you. I want you even knowing if I marry you, I've got an instant family, complete with a suicidal brother-in-law and a Gypsy houseboy with the temperament of a poked bear. "Merripen is not a houseboy. "Call him what you like. He comes with the Hathaways. I accept that."
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"Without adversity a person hardly knows whether they are honest or not."
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"National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same."
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"I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you."
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"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it."
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"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness."
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"If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual."
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"He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson."
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"Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from."
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"All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others."
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"Is there any pleasure on earth as great as the circle of Christian friends by a good fire?"
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"Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sweating. Choose a theme, an idea, and squeeze your brain until it hurts. That's called inspiration."
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"It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action."
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"When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things."
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"We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that."
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"The truth is, I could no more dictate her nature than she could dictate mine. Kinsey's happy as she is and she doesn't need to be rescued, improved, or saved."
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"Katniss: 'What about you? Ive seen you in the market. You can lift hundred pound bags of flour'. I snap at himTell him that. Thats not nothing.Peeta: Yes and Im sure the arena will be full of bags of flour for me to chuck at people."
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"My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.''Learned,' I repeated in amazement. 'How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?"
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"Swifts, on a fine morning in May, flying this way, that way, sailing around at a great hight, perfectly happily. Then, one leaps onto the back of another, grasps tightly and forgetting to fly they both sink down and down, in a great dying fall, fathom after fathom, until the female utters a loud, piercing cry of ecstasy."
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