American Novelist Quotes

You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

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.

Art is the most terrifying of human inventions — it preserves the right to undermine all categories.

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

You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.

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

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

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

Jacqueline Kelly

You can't expect people to give you the things you love, unless you know how to ask.

Genevieve Valentine

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

Judith McNaught

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

It just goes to show that what one person considers a "bad attitude" might actually just be total frustration over being pushed beyond the brink of one's mental and physical endurance.

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

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.

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

Jacqueline Woodson

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

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?

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

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

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

James Lee Burke

Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.

Donald E. Westlake

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

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