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Quotes by Novelist
"It does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants."
36
"You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it."
36
"Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with."
36
"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old."
Old,
36
"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."
36
"She stopped at the desk and held up a can for his view. "This looks like an ordinary hairspray can, right?""Of course." he said though he had no idea what hairspray was."
36
"This is what happens when you look back to happiness, this pain, this heart-break, this discontent."
36
"I've attended seven schools in ten years,' I explain. 'So you can rest assured I know you. You're the girl who thinks being cruel is the same thing as being witty. You think being loud is the same thing as being right. And, most of all, you're the girl who is very, very pretty. And also very, very...common. trust me. There's at least one of you in every school.' I watch her features shift. 'Oh. Wait. Did you think you were unique?"
36
"Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake."
36
"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."
36
"It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!"
36
"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
36
"Hercules used noise! Brass bells! He scared them away with the most horrible sound he could-" said Percy"Percy... Chiron's collection!"
36
"Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?"
36
"I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth."
36
"By the way, don't thank me for saving you, thank the lifeguards. If it was up to me, I would've just carried you off to the building by the boardwalk that said SURGERY. I'm sorry, but there's a big difference between a family doctor treating you for the sniffles, and a guy who actually owns and knows how to use an operating table."
36
"Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book."
36
"Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do."
36
"History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
36
"The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power."
36
"What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?"
36
"I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting."
36
"When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't."
36
"I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate."
36
"Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom."
36
"Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!"
36
"But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie."
36
"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance."
36
"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."
36
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
36
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