20th-century Novelist Quotes

The house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.

Egyptians are like camels: they can put up with beatings, humiliation and starvation for a long time but when they rebel they do so suddenly and with a force that is impossible to control.

Alaa Al Aswany
Alaa Al Aswany
Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

A man gets used to riding on at the break of day. Comes to think that movement and noise is where life is, when after all there's life in stillness and quiet too.

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

When I read passages like this, I want to look for the nearest wall to bang my head against.

S. T. Joshi
S. T. Joshi
The gamblers' blood that flowed through Mama's and Papa's veins influenced every decision they had made in their lives. It seemed perfectly normal for us to trust a roll of the dice to decide where we lived, attended school, went on vacation, took jobs, and whom we married.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

Rick Moody
Rick Moody
NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. No Voice to God. A waste to try. Cut off. No way of reaching out or up. Maybe only one way. Not God's way. No matter if him is Jesus or him is Jah. Him not gwan like dis one lickle bit. NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff
Alas, we are all caught in the same mill. We are vain and we are dishonest because it is necessary to triumph over other vain and dishonest persons.

It is very painful to love someone and believe you cannot be with them.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

My heart throbs and aches and, for once, it's not for myself. It's for all of us. It's for everyone who knows what it's like to be helpless, to have to watch on the sidelines, to be paralyzed, literally unable to do anything.

The most important revolution the first one: the soldier exchanged for the heart and the intellect.

Sony Labou Tansi
Sony Labou Tansi
Someone had tried to warn me of the kind of catastrophe that is likely to occur when you involve yourself too closely in one of those destinies that is ringed around by the transient tinsel of human applause.

Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone's saviour.

Yet every hair on the body is numbered. And in truth, every day is the beautiful day, the last day.

A. A. Attanasio
A. A. Attanasio
Why would a man need both a wife and a mistress? A smart man would seek out and fall in love with a woman who can play both.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end. I do love storytelling. I start out in a very plain, old-fashioned way. I'm obviously not connecting with the thousands of people I thought were out there. Maybe because I grew up with smart peers, people up on music, science, the world. I grew up with some smart damn people, and that might have hindered me as a writer. You had to be quick.

Anglo-Saxon barbarians. Arthur should have been made a Knight

The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker.

Democracy is not tolerance. Democracy is a prescribed way of life erected on the premise that all men are created equal.

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

Marrows - alas! - are arriving in a steady stream at the back door.... Oddly enough, the majority of people who grow them in Fairacre say, as they hand them over: 'Funny thing! I don't care for them myself. In fact, none of the family likes them!' But still they plant them. It must be the fascination of seeing such a wonderful return for one small seed, that keeps marrow-growers at their dubious task.