Judith Guest Quotations

He had led off being a perfectionist when he discovered that not promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly clean. . . not anything cleared you through the terrifying office of chance; that it is chance and not perfection that rules the world.

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.

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to posses a guiding principle

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

I'm glad I'm successful at it, because it's allowed me to live very well financially, and give my kids a lot of things. It's enabled me to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do. But it's not who I am.

I'm not terrifically comfortable with even thinking about what I've accomplished in relation to who I am and how I relate to other people.

Autonomy is the whole thing; it's what unhappy people are missing. They have given the power to run their lives to other people.

Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.

Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.

Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.

I think living the blessed life is the luck of the draw.

I've never been one to tear the social fabric.

It's true that every day away from work requires two more days to get back into it.

My success is not who I am.

Some people have an unrealistic expectation when it comes to getting published; the fact is most publishers will turn down your work which is why you need to be persistent.

It's always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that's the person I'm going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it's there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain't me.

The 'creator' and the 'editor' - two halves of the writer whole - should sleep in separate rooms.

Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up.

People that keep stiff upper lips find that it's hard to smile.

Two separate, distinct personalities, not separate at all, but inextricably bound, soul and body and mind, to each other, how did we get so far apart so fast?

Sometimes you are being interviewed by someone and you think, if I knew this person they'd be my best friend. Other times you're being interviewed by a complete jerk.

For me being depressed means you can spend all day in bed, and still not get a good night's rest.

Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves.

. . . crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.

The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.

...let the emotional weight of a scene rest on the dialogue wherever possible. This is the easy way to avoid overinterpretation, which seems to be what turns a scene from sympathetic to sentimental.

Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me.

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind

... the monotonous beauty of wealth.

Jesus but people got weird when they lived alone.

Make peace with what is.

Always good to have one crazy in the family ... It takes the pressure off everybody else.

Don't put anyone out of your heart, there's room for all.

You have to live your life according to what comforts you, not what the rest of your family thinks you ought to be doing.

I notice when I'm on these trips, I read like mad. It's the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am!

With my friends, I don't feel pressure to be someone other than who I am.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and Im enjoying it.

Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You don't lose what you never had.

And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.

Make notes—I’ve lost more material than I’ve ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not still up there in one’s brain. It’s in outer space and it ain’t coming back.

And if you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even.

Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.