Novelist Quotes

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.