American Novelist Quotations | Page 2

Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that I was a complete Hitchcock fanatic from age 9.

For the most part, I have a very manageable celebrity. People recognize me from time to time, and they usually say very appreciative things. It affords me a great deal of pleasure.

The thing that made Groucho special was the way he used his body parts. He also had a wicked tongue. People didn't realize it, but when Groucho said something, he meant it.

I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time.

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

For me, writing something down was the only road out.

I know that when Terry and I were together, 10 years ago, he did not appreciate it when people would ask him what it is like being partnered with a celebrity. Precisely because it suggested that he had no value.

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.

At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'

The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.

Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book.

With my gaudy, exotic material I wanted to create large, dreamy constructions that would not be decorative but powerfully expressive.

Through Kinsey, I get to test my ingenuity and my skills with imaginary firearms... all without leaving the safety of my office chair.

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

The reality has been the opposite of the rhetoric especially when questions have been raised about eminent figures in the establishment.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Life is extremely complicated. I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior and alternatives of that behavior.

Love means never having to say you're sorry.

She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand.

Mother considered a press conference on a par with a visit to a cage of cobras.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

One must always keep one's government under control.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

My education was constantly interrupted. I moved around a great deal, had no real sense of home, except for the New England landscape.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

On the one hand, shopping is dependable: You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it's instant gratification and yet something you buy may well last for years.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

One of the most interesting things about this job is encountering the perceptions people have of me. I'm the person I've always been.

I wish we could have used more than we used, but there is a certain conventional wisdom about filmmaking that says that long phone calls are taboo.

I'd like to get out of here without having to talk to the producer.

Fossil finding will be a very difficult job on Mars. I don't think robotic missions will do it. It will take astronauts and even then it will be a tough job.

Funny, I don't feel any more powerful today than yesterday.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

If it wasn't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away.

He was blessed to have forgotten his binoculars.

He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.

He was the first person to befriend me at Harvard. At any rate, in some class the teacher gave us an exercise which I've used ever since.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

I abandoned fiction for playwriting then for a number of years before taking it up again to write The Beautiful Room Is Empty in the mid-1960s.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Knowing what I do now, I certainly wouldn't decide to write a first novel because I wouldn't have anything like the necessary life experience.

Knowledge is power. Your education is the most important thing you can do.

Judge not, lest you be so fearful of judgment that you can hardly breath.

I taught more school, had two more sons and then in 1970 I wrote a short story and sent it to a national contest, where I won 60th prize out of 100.

I was dictating to my mother when I was 5.

I think it's time for the people and the press, in particular, to be more vigilant about not giving equal weight to lies as they give the truth.

I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.

Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Carry.

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.

Look at everthing as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

The antitrust division has been left in very good shape by Joel Klein. I've found a number of enforcement issues I'm happy to pursue.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

Well, Terry and I broke up 10 years ago. So the healing that was going to happen, happened. So mostly this was a stroll down memory lane.

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

The government serves the people - not vice-versa.

Until I quit writing and I don't know when that will be, I will always be reading something that has to do with what I'm working on.

What happened was that after I wrote The Ice Storm I had a period where I was blocked for a little bit, before I wrote Purple America.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

At some point they figured out that you can win elections with a pro-European policy because the voters hope this will improve their lives.

Aside from all that, we recall that antibodies to malaria and other diseases prevalent in Africa show up as HIV-positive on tests.

Courage is the capacity to confirm what can be imagined.

There was a certain hum that would be generated by the book when I was writing well; I'd stop working the instant that hum snapped off.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.