American Novelist Quotes

And holy hell the chocolate is so intense and pure it should be named an element and given a spot on the periodic table. It would be Ch, which isn't even taken.

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

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

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

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.

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

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.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

Cheryl Mendelson

It's when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I'd assassinated, that I unravel inside.

Cheyenne McCray

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

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

The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills.

Tom Flynn (author)

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.

It is difficult to resist a force of nature, Maman. His seduction is like all my senses struck by bolts of lightning.

I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve!

Catharine Sedgwick

A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represent cutting free, cutting loose, in the story's beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.

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

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.

All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward.

Jacqueline Carey

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