Author Quotes

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'

I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.

Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.

A horse is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle.

Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

A woman should be an illusion.

You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

Yes, I suffer terribly from depression. I have to work at being happy, it's not my natural instinct. My natural instinct is, if something wonderful happens, to throw water in my own face.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

I think that people that are not sensitive, who seem to bang through life, do survive, but I don't think they get the really soaring feelings that people who are more artistically bent can get.

I have a lot of friends that are ex-Miss Alabamas and ex-Miss Georgias.

Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way.