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Quotes by Novelist
"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
37
"What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?"
37
"Every writer is a writer of the generation before."
37
"America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information."
37
"Oh, I have plenty of problems with Rabbit, it's just that my comfort level with his name is standing in line behind about a hundred more important things."
37
"I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third."
37
"The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it."
37
"My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder."
37
"Any man, you'll soon learn, has an insurmountable need to blame someone else when he is made to look a fool."
37
"It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life."
37
"He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant."
37
"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that."
37
"But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent."
37
"There hardly can be a greater difference between any two men, than there too often is, between the same man, a lover and a husband."
37
"I'll not listen to reason... reason always means what someone else has got to say."
37
"A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises."
37
"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life."
37
"Money is the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it."
37
"Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in."
37
"Let me say right here, if I haven't made it clear, that I have seen as many pale, naked old-man parts in the last twenty-four hours to bruise my delicate psyche for a lifetime, so don't be surprised if you someday find me wandering the moors at midnight, a crazed look in my eye, babbling about albino Tater Tots nesting in Brillo pads and being pursued by sagging man ass, because that shit can happen when you've been traumatized."
37
"He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did."
37
"It is much easier to find fault with others, than to be faultless ourselves."
37
"But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be."
37
"And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day."
37
"To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue."
37
"She's so small, yet she contains so much evil."
37
"Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for."
Will,
37
"That what?" "That I knew i misjudged you. That you love him. I'm not saying In what way. Maybe you don't know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him," he says gently."
37
"Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away."
37
"The first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life."
37
"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
37
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it."
37
"A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual."
37
"How had I lost so much in such a short period of time? It would seem like leaving your family, living in some foreign place, and being separated from the person you love should be events that take years to roll into place, not just a day."
37
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