Author Quotes

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, 'Why god? Why me?' and the thundering voice of God answered, 'There's just something about you that pisses me off.'

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.

People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place.

If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.