Novelist Quotes

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt.

Out of the depths, O Lord, out of the depths,' begins the most beautiful of the services of our church, and it is out of the depths of my life that I must bring the incidents of this story.

I write of the wish that comes true - for some reason, a terrifying concept.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.

There came to port last Sunday night the queerest little craft, without an inch of rigging on; I looked and looked - and laughed. It seemed so curious that she should cross the unknown water, and moor herself within my room - my daughter! O my daughter!

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

Everybody knows the Lord loveth a cheerful giver.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.

You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you.

To be a Jew is a destiny.

Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.

Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.