American Quotes

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.

To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

My favorite animal is steak.

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.

I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

You're only as good as your last haircut.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

The big lesson I learned from Hurricane Katrina is that we have to be thinking about the unthinkable because sometimes the unthinkable happens.

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really disting

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

Kansas had better stop raising corn and begin raising hell.

An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

Science is all metaphor.