Novelist Quotes

The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.

Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson
A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine, and the hearth in foul weather.

Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

I loved all the parts of him, even the ones I didn't understand.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

Despite everything that Harlem did to our generation, I think it gave something to a few. It gave them a strength that couldn't be obtained anywhere else.

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

You are a terror, aren't you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won't be able to find the things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.'So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed hearts somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. 'Tidying up is what I'm here for!' she shouted at Howl. 'Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,' Howl said.

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.

I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

I imagined calling in to my own radio show: Yeah hi, I'm a werewolf, and I'm stuck in a cabin in the woods with another werewolf and a werewolf hunter...

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

Jonathan Evison
Jonathan Evison
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

As Auntie Mame:
Life is a banquet, and some poor suckers are starving to death.

Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now.
But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it.

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

Jim Shepard
Jim Shepard
We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

If it's easy to be friendly she will be. If the wind blows the other way her friendship will be gone. And I'm thinking the wind is blowing the other way. She has found some other way to be an important person in her own right by hating others.

Charlaine Harris
Charlaine Harris
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.

"You got a ninety percent chance," he said. Osno said quickly, "How do you get that figure?" He always did that whenever somebody pulled a statistic on him. He hated statisticians.

Mario Puzo
Mario Puzo
Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Meg Rosoff
Meg Rosoff
The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love.