Novelist Quotes

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

Never does one so constantly see so many different things as when peering from a small window.

Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you've never been there, you don't know what it's like until you're too far in to stop the process.

There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.

For the entire state of Georgia, having the premiere of Gone With the Wind on home ground was like winning the Battle of Atlanta 75 years late.

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

Alan Dean Foster

You can take the girl out of the library, but you can't take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.

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

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

To know a little less and to understand a little more: that, it seems to me, is our greatest need.

James Ramsey Ullman

Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

William Kittredge

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

When I read passages like this, I want to look for the nearest wall to bang my head against.

It is by surmounting difficulties, not by sinking under them that we discover our fortitude.

Hannah Webster Foster

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

The Fourth Dimension is just a hypothetical math concept. Or else it's time, or something. Just a lot of sci-fi crud.

William Sleator

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

Go play golf. Go to the golf course. Hit the ball. Find the ball. Repeat until the ball is in the hole. Have fun. The end.

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.

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not.

Jeanne C. Stein

After all, this is a world of rock and water and air. It is elemental. It is not ours.

Sleep for me is great and the deeper the better, for there I often dream and dreams awaken me to the crisis of living.

It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.