American Novelist Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Henry James

Pearl S. Buck

Nathaniel Hawthorne

J. D. Salinger

Sylvia Plath

Toni Morrison

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death.

James Lee Burke

Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.

John D. MacDonald

Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?

Stephen R. Donaldson

I knew, deep down, that love, though a beautiful beginning, isn't enough. It's the practice of honoring and caring for another that's noble, not the emotion of love itself. The emotion is the easy part.

Megan McCafferty

Customers are ninjas now. They are stealthily evaluating you right under your nose.

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway — you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective.

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.

Jacqueline Kelly

Oh — oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture.

Jennifer Echols

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

Oppression is never right, even when it is elegant.

I thought I would be safe here.
You are. For the first time, he touched her, touched her hand. Safe from everything but paper and ink. Please. Put those down.
Paper and ink. She clutched the books to her ample chest. They're not nothing, Alec. They're pretty much everything to me: the embodiment of ideas, of thought—of free and open thought. Of inquiry and supposition. All of it.

Clearly the sight of a well-muscled forearm incited a woman to utter depravity. How else to explain the invention of cuffs?

A good rule of angling philosophy is not to interfere with any fishermans ways of being happy, unless you want to be hated.

Why is it that people don't know what to say when something bad has happened to someone they know? Maybe because they think there are some magic words that will make everything all right again, only they don't know what the words are.

Ellen Wittlinger

Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over.

I've always thought of this city as Disneyland for adults.... There's no danger of Las Vegas expiring from an excess of good taste.

I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?