Top 67 Quotes & Sayings by Wally Lamb

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

The greatest griefs are silent.

Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

I work hard, do my best and send it out to the world hoping that people can relate to it. I accept any reaction and hope they think it is worth reading.

I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

I grew up in a household of women, they ran the show, they kept it all together. I credit my ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better; what should I cut out to make it stronger; what do I need to do to clarify it; and finally, what should I reposition.

I'm a very rooted person. I grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, I still live in Connecticut.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

With destruction comes renovation.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

I am a plodder, I make an appointment with my computer everyday and I have no idea where I am going.

What if I don’t like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?