Novelist Quotes

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.

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

Richard McKenna

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

He was an admirer of the bullfight, and had once drawn my attention to the fact that only cricket and bullfighting had inspired any appreciable literature.

It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.

Robert Sheckley

Kate and Mercer gave each other a smile with a future in it.

There comes a moment in your life when, no matter what you do, you bore everybody else. There is only one way to get back the lost prestige. Dying.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat is the sun, hence on this window-ledge.

William Hale White

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

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

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.

On the wings of love, we'll soar to the depths.

John Reed (novelist)

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Every generation proclaims that each must lead his own life, but seldom grants the subsequent generation the right to lead theirs.

You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.