Quotes About Author

Regrets will eat you alive if you let them. You gotta outrun them. Find something in the now.

I'm an idiot like you said, so whatever you say about me doesn't matter, but you know... Don't you dare point a gun at your own brother!

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

If we do not voluntarily keep our promises to God to read, He will see to their fulfillment some other, less pleasant, way. God thinks reading important!

I've never really had a problem with the imagination level of an audience. They're always smarter and savvier than any studio exec will give them credit for.

after I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home.

removed the "God-given" from this conception and made "reason" the sole criterion for truth.

He could understand, condone the massive use of force, but the terrors of its particularizations horrified him.

Thoreau went to jail, not to Canada. That's civil disobedience. The other is self-interest, cloaked with morality.

And there was another memorable lesson. Such is the power of the written word that the works of a single thoughtful writer—and indeed sometimes just one powerful book—might focus the direction of a young person's life.

The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence was not without some collateral

When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real , which is at the bottom of my inquiries.

The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her—when we reach "huddled" we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author's magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried.

The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.

This was why men exhausted her so. It was a wonder the world didn't collapse daily from the weight of men's egos, she thought.

There was Barbra, sitting among all her objects, all of the things she loved best in the world; a tableau of capitalism.

an insidious form of pride had crept into my heart and taken up residence: the pride of suffering. p 297

If the head can keep the thought in the moment of death, just for a brief time, than the head, which just felt on the ground, was a surprised head.

The excitement is often grand, as is the reason least, in the beginning of the attack.

His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities—German, Japanese, Italians, and others—was a failure. Nonetheless,

The Quakers were the only group in America that consistently opposed internment and offered protection for internees.

I stepped out on faith to follow my lifelong dream of being an author. I made real sacrifices and took big risks. But living, it seems to me, is largely about risk.

As worthless as guilt was known to be, he couldn't help feeling it, seeing his wife work herself to exhaustion for a parish tea that would last only two hours.

As far as I could tell, Mount Sherman had no ego, no desire to create its own destiny. It was surrendered, as all of nature is surrendered. The wilderness gives us that example continually.