Novelist Quotes

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.