top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out."
33
"I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions."
33
"So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors."
33
"People are too complicated to have simple labels."
33
"I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time."
Time,
33
"Wise are they who have learned these truths: Trouble is temporary. Time is tonic. Tribulation is a test tube."
33
"Worry is the secret weapon perpetrated upon us by the dark forces of the world that lurk in the shape of fear, uncertainty, confusion, and loss.We, on the other hand, have our own secret weapon against these incorporeal fiends.It is laughter."
33
"In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives."
33
"I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow."
Work,
33
"My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company."
33
"They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves."
33
"Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything."
33
"Lincoln's stature and strength, his intelligence and ambition - in short, all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem, rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village."
33
"People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots."
33
"Generally a chef's book is like a calling card or a portfolio to display their personal work."
Work,
33
"I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood."
33
"The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it."
33
"McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object."
33
"It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree."
33
"Celebrities are nowhere as rich as some people think they are."
33
"I think that you have to do everything you can do to empower girls when they are young, from their education, to their successful independence, to their sexual self-knowledge."
33
"There aren't enough good journalists. There are too many who really weren't groomed to be reporters and, as a result, some of the reporting is shallow."
33
"Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem."
33
"So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay's got that she hasn't got. So I just write back to her and says, Nothin', honey. Only she's got it here."
Home,
33
"Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon."
33
"Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."
33
"Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny."
33
"You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one."
33
"War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there."
33
"I will teach my son, that his desire to be great doesn't depend on those unfortunate enough to ignore their own."
33
"No one person can possibly combine all the elements supposed to make up what everyone means by friendship."
33
"I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They're desperate to know that you're not lying to them or misleading them."
33
bottom of page