American Novelist Quotes

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

Alexander Theroux

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.

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

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

Stephen R. Donaldson

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

I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute

That's what you realized when you got older. When you were little, you thought you were just too young to understand the answers and that when you got older things would come into focus. Then you had to finally face the truth: There were no answers.

Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.

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

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

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

A man deserves credit when he accomplishes something of importance. Something that provides for the betterment of his life and his family's life and, whenever possible, mankind.

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

We are a material-mad race of people. Build, increase, expand, pile up, hoard! More and more and more. "If we can just make enough money to-to- !" Jesus said: "Sell what ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth."

The older people get, the more like themselves they become, if you see what I mean.

Barbara D'Amato

It takes more than Love and Passion to make a relationship work

Christie Ridgway

There are many more ways to be attractive than to be beautiful.

Do not the auburn-haired gain a new sense of freedom as a blonde (see Miss Clairol)? Who can deny the madness of a redesigned nose (see Miami Beach)? Yes, indeed. A wild excitement engulfed me. My mirrored image reflected, in an occult fashion, a magnificent future.... The texture of my hair had changed.

Charles Stevenson Wright

The most truly generous persons are those who give silently without hope of praise or reward.

Carol Ryrie Brink

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.

Tis emblematic, the rose of youth and health soon fades when watered by the tear of affliction.

Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Maria Dahvana Headley

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy. In the end, all you get is a few words.

Scott Nicholson

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