Writer Quotes

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.

To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman.

To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane.

Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious - friendship and learning.

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Desire creates its own object.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everyone else in the society.

Life is lived in common, but not in community.

It takes a certain level of aspiration before one can take advantage of opportunities that are clearly offered.