top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."
13
"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
13
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
13
"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."
13
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
13
"Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel."
13
"Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it."
13
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
13
"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
13
"Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children."
13
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
13
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
13
"To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart."
13
"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
13
"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."
13
"One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to."
13
"It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog."
12
"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."
12
"The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions."
12
"Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man."
12
"Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience."
12
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."
12
"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"
12
"It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure."
12
"Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that I was a complete Hitchcock fanatic from age 9."
12
"We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally."
12
"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
12
"A good heart is better than all the heads in the world."
12
"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look."
12
"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness."
12
"I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school."
12
"The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is."
12
"The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent."
12
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
12
"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."
11
bottom of page