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Quotes by Writer
"Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you."
44
"Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days."
44
"You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. Other people can cope with the waves, it's his job to watch the tide."
44
"It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words."
44
"You will never succeed while smarting under the drudgery of your occupation, if you are constantly haunted with the idea that you could succeed better in something else."
44
"There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine."
44
"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"
44
"I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes."
44
"If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having."
44
"A living skeleton isn't enough for you, is it? What does it take to impress young people these days?"
44
"I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal."
44
"I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them."
44
"The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground."
44
"You look rather rash my dear your colors don't quite match your face."
44
"A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties."
44
"Men now monopolize the upper levels... depriving women of their rightful share of opportunities for incompetence."
44
"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."
44
"A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it."
44
"He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn't someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool."
44
"The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing."
44
"It was inevitable that in doing this I should arrive at new results, and it is perhaps understandable that in the end I have felt impelled to present these results not only in the dry form of a catalogue, but also in a more connected and personal one."
44
"Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity."
44
"Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish."
44
"History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim."
44
"Well I actually do have a country house in Connecticut with a population of 3,000. Like, how small is that? I spend a lot of time there - I write up there. So I kind of have the best of both worlds and I love going up there."
44
"Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other."
44
"Right, well, we've got to work out what we need. We've got to work out what we need, how we get it, and what we need to get to get what we need."
44
"I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer."
44
"The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good."
44
"Every single important thing we do is something we didn't use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear."
44
"For why should we not admire more the angels themselves and the blessed choirs of heaven?"
44
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