Quotes from Thomas Mallon

Daisy loved all parades, especially this one, whose crush of observers, prone to impulsive kisses, made it one more piece of the mistletoe under which she lived her life

about Voltaire)...he was generally unbedeviled by any foolish consistency.

To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists

causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity-and then everything else.

I always fall for the truly cold, cold people, cold men because I decide their reserve and awkwardness is really bottled-up warmth that they're waiting for me to release, an act for which they'll repay me with extravagant love.

So you'll never guess who I heard from," said Kelly. "Who would that be?" "Not 'whom'?" asked Kelly, her face momentarily clouded by doubt. "No, my dear. It's a subject, not an object. At least in my question.

I'm not proceeding entirely by logic. You and your cat's cradle of knowns and unknowns can work that way. A fine lot of good it's doing!

Her attraction to that solid type depended to some extent on a belief in herself as its opposite-a girl still cut out for unusual adventures and unusual personalities...Yes, it was time to put an end to her girlhood, but she couldn't yet put an end to this sense of herself...

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

I was raised - and still consider myself to be - Catholic, though I'm non-practicing and haven't fulfilled my Easter duty since sometime during the Nixon years. I'm assailed by all kinds of stimulating doubts, but I do believe in God.

Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.