American Novelist Quotes

It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.

Zora Neale Hurston

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

The easy road is always under construction,so have an alternate route planned.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Elizabeth Hardwick

The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle, And some have been known to fall in it. In tennis it's nothing, but it can be received, And sometimes a person may win it. Though not seen or heard it may be perceived, Like princes or bees it's in clover. The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle, And without it one cannot start over.

Trenton Lee Stewart

If it's easy to be friendly she will be. If the wind blows the other way her friendship will be gone. And I'm thinking the wind is blowing the other way. She has found some other way to be an important person in her own right by hating others.

Charlaine Harris

We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

The Goddess teaches us that every ending is also a beginning. May there be rebirth from this death.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Judith McNaught

I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

We are in the middle of what looks increasingly like the zombie apocalypse. Moaning people don't need help. Moaning people are intending to eat us.

Love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth.

Zelda Fitzgerald

You can argue that writers are notoriously wrong about what they think is their best work.

Bret Easton Ellis

There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

Dignity is like morality, Mirabilis barked. Too much is as bad as too little.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

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.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane