American Novelist Quotes

The implications of self-definition, self-celebration, and perhaps not a little self-inflation and self-designation are nevertheless quite as obvious in each as for all.

Albert Murray (writer)

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

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

Near or far, there are burdens and terrors in sisterhood, and perhaps the nearer, the more complicated.

Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one's own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they've hidden their stash so well a cop won't find it. They're always wrong.

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

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.

Jazz musicians symbolize... a freedom from the taste-making of mass media and an embracing of a vision that has much more to do with aesthetic satisfaction than the gold-rush culture of popular entertainment, where one takes the clichés of adolescent narcissism into the side of the mountain rather than a pickaxe, some pans, and a burro.

I still go to bed in mascara on the chance I'll be seen a lover.

Christine Schutt

We could hurt each other even when we weren't trying to, and that none of us was as perfect as we liked to pretend.

Meg Waite Clayton

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.

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

The marks on our lives are like music notes on the page--they sing a song.

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.

It ought to be a crime for any woman to have children that writes books.

Josephine Daskam Bacon

Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.

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.

Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs.

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.