Top 399 Quotes & Sayings by Anna Quindlen - Page 7

I do get a sense that there's a huge disconnect between the political powers and what's really happening, so right-wing conservatives can talk about contraception all they want, but the women of America are using birth control. It's as simple as that.

The Church does an enormous amount of good, and it carries one of the most valuable messages imaginable - that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and that if you have two coats you should give one to the man who has none.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.

I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.

People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.

We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.

I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

What usually happens is that when I'm nearing the end of one novel a vague idea about what I want to do next begins to present itself to me in terms of theme. And I would say over about the next six to eight months, usually as I'm out power walking in the morning, or when I'm cooking at night, or when I'm driving in the car, the people who might embody those themes take on a sharper and sharper focus. And there comes this sort of critical mass moment when they actually start to do things in my head.

There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think might be important or pivotal, a lot of times I'll scribble notes down somewhere until I can get back to the book. Of course half the time I look at those notes the next morning and think, "What was that about?"

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

So I do think sometimes the political mechanism is completely disconnected from the people. However, what I will say is that history tells us that whenever things start to move too fast, whenever progress makes people feel a little breathless, one of the go-to spots that government, that the ruling powers that society goes to is to try to repress women.

You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.

If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.

Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.

Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.

I've always had a certain facility with words.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay.