Quotes About Author

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

There's the Oxford comma, but I like the Shatner comma. It's when you pepper them in, so, you know where, to add, dramatic pauses.

Griffin just grins, "You're welcome," he says. Then he adds, "You live across the street from Nicole, right? Maybe Ally will be there." Ha! I should have known.

shangzuo, the seat of honor facing the door? Who would

Enigma code 48 and bombe machine 56, 57–9

When people stand up and talk about the great success that the EU has been, I'm not sure anybody saying it really believes it themselves anymore.

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known.

You're asking the wrong girl about fame. I'm hardly famous. I wouldn't want to trade places with anyone else.

You're living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand, except for this: Magicians rarely share their secrets.

in his mind, nothing could be more delightful than to live in solitude, and enjoy the spectacle of nature, and sometimes read some book or other.

And in a very civil fashion did Manilov did so, even going as far as to address the man in the second person plural.

Despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is said.

and by their frequent sacrifices to Bacchus they showed that even yet there remains in the Slavonic nature a certain element of paganism.

Many of the ladies were dressed well and fashionably, others were dressed in whatever God sends to a provincial town.

On the twenty-fifth day of March, an extraordinary strange incident occurred in Petersburg.

There was a story to do with this story: It was told us by Stephan Ivanovich Kurochka, who used to come over from Gadyach.

Ukrainian was to Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people.

He himself is almost a myth, and his story a legend. To tell about him, one should be French, because only the people of that nation manage to explain to others what they don't understand themselves.

Una volta mostrò a Chodasevic la poesia di un autore della generazione «minore» e gli domandò che metro fosse: un metro, secondo Rudnev, poco serio e addirittura ballabile. Era il trimetro giambico. Chodasevic, arrivato a casa, si sdraiò voltando la faccia verso la parete e disse: «Ecco da che gente dipendiamo».

Everything had changed now. Gothenburg, Kiruna, had become just anecdotes he'd tell Ingrid instead of some sort of final judgment against him. He

One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.

To the tongue which bringeth thee words without reason, the answer that best beseemeth thee is?silence.