Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Kennedy

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

Words matter, words have import.

There is much to be said for solitude.

We all want to fix things. Just as we all believe that so much in life can be rectified. Mend fences, build bridges, reach out, engage in mutual healing.

The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them--not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

There were moments when I felt seriously unhinged; when I was convinced that I would never, ever recover from what had happened, when it was absolutely clear to me that life from this point on would be constant agony.