American Novelist Quotes

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

Christopher Barzak

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

Stephen R. Donaldson

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.

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

Sex without love is like a goddamn business transaction. And sometimes both parties feel as if they got a good deal, but that doesn't make it any less so.

To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.

John Clellon Holmes

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

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.

Max: "You'll never be good enough to deserve her, you know." Ash: "God doesn't always give you what you deserve," Ash said quietly. "Sometimes he gives you what you can't live without.

Teresa Medeiros

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?

I am going to devour you, Magdelegna, he promised her, the darkness of his cravings coming to bear on her fully at last. You wanted to know my passions? Allow me to introduce them to you.

Jacquelyn Frank

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.

It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others.

Stefan Petrucha

There are bullfighters who do it just for the money-they are worthless [said Hemingway]. The only one who matters is the bullfighter who feels it, so that if he did it for nothing, he would do it just as well. Same holds true for damn near everyone.

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

Alexander Theroux

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.

Gregory Galloway

The faith is not the problem, the problem is the faithful.

Robert Ferrigno

Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown to the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through.

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

Oppression is never right, even when it is elegant.

Sparkling and bright in liquid light
Does the wine our goblets gleam in;
With hue as red as the rosy bed
Which a bee would choose to dream in.
Then fill to-night, with hearts as light
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim on the beaker's brim
And break on the lips while meeting.

Charles Fenno Hoffman

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer―

Raymond E. Feist

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

An author never has a vacation. He's a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he's saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.

Ben Ames Williams