Novelist Quotes

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.

A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

Warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. Terror must never be answered with terror.

I, like most of my friends, couldn't believe I bought a mountain called Misery Mountain, because it was so appropriate.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.