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Quotes by Novelist
"I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along."
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"I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability."
41
"An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details."
41
"It is bodies that make us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through or hands to hold?"
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"In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries."
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"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."
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"I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way."
41
"We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars."
41
"What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it."
41
"If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door."
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"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity-and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top."
41
"Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory."
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"And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void."
41
"At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone."
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"Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me."
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"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts."
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"The alphabet is where all our secrets begin."
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"A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away."
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"Oh, sweet! New man meat's made it to town, y'all. Let's gobble."
41
"I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off."
41
"You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that."
41
"When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters."
41
"How do you feel? she asked, trying to fluff his pillow. "Other than terrible, I mean.He moved his head slightly to the side. It seemed to be a sickly interpretation of a shrug."Of course you're feeling terrible, she clarified, "but is there any change? More terrible? Less terrible?He made no response."The same amount of terrible?"
41
"Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment."
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"Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy."
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"My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero."
41
"There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital."
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"Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties."
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"I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since."
41
"Well, to tell you the truth, I've thought of it often and often before, but he's such devilish good company is Huntingdon, after all - you can't imagine what a jovial good fellow he is when he's not fairly drunk, only just primed or half - seas - over - we all have a bit of a liking for him at the bottom of our hearts, though we can't respect him.'But should you wish yourself to be like him?'No, I'd rather be like myself, bad as I am."
41
"Been eating candies, have you?""You sent those?" She kept her mouth closed as much as possible."Of course." He picked up the brown bad of candy on the table. "What's your..." He trailed off as he weighed the bad in his hands. "Didn't I give you three pounds of candy?"She smiled impishly."You ate half the bag!""Was I supposed to save it?""I would have liked some!""You never told me that.""Because I didn't expect you to consume all of it before breakfast!"She snatched the bag from him and put it on the table. "Well, that just hows poor judgement on your part, doesn't it?"
41
"The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ..."
41
"I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal."
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"If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive."
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"Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?"
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