American Novelist Quotes

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

Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a god, her name is Mystery.

Children and barbarians have clear ideas of justice due to them, but no idea at all of justice due from them.

Murray Leinster

I would add to my mother's wisdom that the key to love is in the breath. You know you love a man when you can stand his breath in the morning after a night of drinking and cigarettes. When you can kiss him after he finishes a garlic and butter sandwich and still enjoy the feel of his lips. When he looks into your eyes, tells you he loves you—and the pickled herring and onions are stronger than his voice—yet you still smile. You still want to be close to him. Yes, then you have found love. My Baba used to say that the breath is a taste of the spirit. When two spirits recognize each other in memory and future, then love grows.

Valya Dudycz Lupescu

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

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

Events, I say to the Captain, events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation. Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

Wizards die the same as other men, once you cut their heads off.

George R. R. Martin

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.

I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about "grace." I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.

Robert McCammon

There's not much to be said for sightseeing. You go somewhere that has a waterfall. You have a beer, watch the water go over the edge, and move on. Tours are all the same. In the end, the only thing that matters is the beer.

There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.

Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.

Richard McKenna

Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

Patricia A. McKillip

The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.

Fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. While it burned adoringly in the core of the Temple, it had also scorched the life from a city, this night, and spewed its venom over the land. How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still.

Donald Grant Mitchell

Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics?

Christopher Moore

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