Quotes About Author

I am damned if I will spend my time listenin' to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!

I suppose I should warn you, Padre. In the absence of male supervision, my mother has become a revolutionary. ~Renzo Leoni

Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way.

Would you object to a civil ceremony?" "That would certainly be nicer than shouting abuse at one another," Gina replied, straight-faced

Demons especially enjoy metaphors.

War doesn't have a kingdom," she said. "War belongs to the whole world. Come on, my little scarlet Horseman. Have a drink.

Did you listen to that tape? It makes me sound terrible.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.

The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.

sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.

Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.

sister was. But I couldn't resist such a clear shot. So I said her

Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)

I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought "easy.

Hey, Mimi. Did that homophobe lady bring any dessert?

I went to college at Florida State, which is where I got my interior design degree, and after college, I moved down to Miami. We moved back here a few years ago." "Miami. Is that where you met your

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.

Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.

the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling?

But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve.

What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life.