American Quotes

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

There is no medical proof that television causes brain damage - at least from over five feet away. In fact, TV is probably the least physically harmful of all the narcotics known to man.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

There's nothing more irresistible to a man than a woman who's in love with him.

After all, the wool of a black sheep is just as warm.

If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.

I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.

I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

I was a busy kid in high school - a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. Prom king was kind of silly, but the rest of the stuff was important to me.

I want to move people.

I used to work for a management consulting company, so I dressed differently - business casual, probably a lot of things from Banana Republic. My wardrobe now is definitely more expensive, but I always dress for the occasion.

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.

I think they need to get a more reliable way of watching television on the laptop. Because I travel so much, if I want to watch my favorite sports team it might not be showing in that place, so I want a reliable way to watch whatever I want to watch on my laptop.

I think I'm happier, not just because of winning Grammys and selling records, but because it's really fulfilling to have all these things happen with something you love to do.

I played classical as a kid.