Quotes About Insight

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.

So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Well, we'll know better next time.

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

Knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth.

Yes, I think you're the first person to think of this.

I'm no genius, but I'm smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

Somos, así, los libros que hemos leído. O somos, de lo contrario, el vacío que la ausencia de libros ha abierto a nuestras vidas.

No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like Where do your ideas come from? Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction.

Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: you gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.

1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don't love you or your work.

The kind of clarity crazy people demand from the not-crazy.

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things.

they have the eyes of people who can tell what time it is by the colour of the sky... their eyes do not bite

The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it

Being simply illustrations, of how each of us reads, becomes engaged in and watches what is being read all at the same time.

Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.