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Quotes by Writer
"Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy-in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy."
28
"Nations are not thugs. They are bodies of intelligent people."
28
"It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means."
28
"Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta."
28
"For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time."
28
"In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half."
28
"Crashing through windows I thought were open doors. Apologizing for the mess. Rationalizing my behavior in metaphors you'll simply never understand. Learning to accept defeat. Watching you walk away from me, from us, from all of this, using every door I missed. Begging, 'Please don't leave me now, I killed those boys to make you love me."
28
"It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience."
28
"Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary"
28
"See how many doors open, Alastor said, when someone with influence and ideas comes along with a key? Fortune can be hoarded, or it can be shared."
28
"Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?"
28
"My nose bleeds, and every comedown feels like an overdose. I try to make peace with God each time, but he shows no interest, and it reminds me of my dad, and I get so upset that I just have to do another line. Like I said, a cycle."
28
"I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home."
Home,
28
"They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance."
28
"Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will."
28
"Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans -- neither fearing the loss of the other."
28
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
28
"When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal."
28
"The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish."
28
"I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress."
28
"Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again- words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!"
28
"Cheerfulness, sir, is the principle ingredient in the composition of health."
28
"The tombstone is about the only thing that can stand upright and lie on its face at the same time."
28
"I also like flyfishing - maybe I would have figured a way to make a living out of that?"
28
"To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history."
28
"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up."
28
"People tell me they laughed hard enough to wake their spouses, that they've given away numerous copies to friends, and that it's the one Trek book they'll give to people they wouldn't expect to like others."
28
"No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in."
Life,
28
"In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers."
28
"Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly."
28
"Life isn't fair.' I said. 'It's taken me a while to get that. It's always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You'll make plans, and it'll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they'll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them. You'll try for something and won't get it. You don't have to find meaning in it; you don't have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That's your job."
28
"I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity."
28
"Happy is the man who can do only one thing: in doing it he fulfills his destiny."
28
"No one knows while experiencing their darkest hour that some day they may use that very experience to illuminate the ways for others. Nothing is ever wasted."
28
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