Author Quotes

No one knows exactly where thought comes from, but it can be said that thought comes from the same place as whatever it is that beats our heart... it comes from being alive.

It seems that we have it backward in our society. We tend to look up to people who are under a great deal of stress, who can handle loads of stress, and those who are under a great deal of pressure.

Circumstances don't make a person; they reveal him or her.

The trick is to be grateful when your mood is high and graceful when it is low.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

That's something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany, and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

One day I think it's the greatest idea ever that I'm working on. The next day I think it's the worst that I've ever worked on - and I swing between that a lot. Some days I'm very happy with what I'm doing, and the next day I am desperate - it's not working out!

The hardest part is developing the idea, and that can take years.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

We have eyes, and we're looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.

Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.

Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.

People's fates are simplified by their names.

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.