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Quotes by Novelist
"Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism."
40
"We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures."
40
"It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare."
40
"A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept."
40
"A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive."
40
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
40
"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life."
40
"I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things."
40
"I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning."
40
"Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life."
40
"In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California."
40
"Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction."
40
"The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends."
40
"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."
40
"Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all."
40
"Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact."
40
"I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul."
40
"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good."
40
"Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say "I love you" into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didn't ask for any, or say "That's silly," or "We're too young for love," or even suggest that she was saying "I love you" because he asked her to. Instead she said, "I love you." The words traveled through the long, long string. The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there."
40
"Now see, if it were me, I wouldn't have led with that. I would've gone with something like 'G'day' or 'Wow, aren't you a little hottie?"
40
"Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called 'Rushdie,' and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd."
40
"Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck."
40
"Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs."
40
"A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad."
40
"The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star..."
40
"After one and a half cocktails, finding the appropriate response is a bit of a challenge. I finally say, 'Thank you for inviting me,' and leave the less desirable 'Want to play strip poker?' in the unscrupulous part of my brain where it belongs."
40
"Why I would sell the whole world for a single kopek, just so that nobody would bother me. Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea now? I'll say let the world go to hell so long as I can have my tea whenever I want it."
40
"School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible."
40
"I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" - a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared " most of all " to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe."
40
"Yes, they have to have a victor. Without a victor, the whole thing would blow up in the Gamemakers' faces. They'd have failed the Capitol. Might possibly even be executed, slowly and painfully, while the cameras broadcast it to every screen in the country."
40
"The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme."
40
"For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction."
40
"At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart."
40
"The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned."
40
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