Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Novelists - Page 17

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

You're looking at that chick like you want to roll her up in a taco and put your hot sauce all over her.

I am not a pacifist in terms of turning the other cheek.

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in 'August: Osage County,' and by the time they're finished, they've acted their movie senseless, too.

The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination: it is a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit.

I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this.

Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

I spent the night on a sliver of rock high up on the east face of Long's Peak, climbing with Tom Frost, and slept at the icy feet of the Dru, listening to the lightning crack above me and the thunder roll down. I only did it to write about it. I would never go up on the Grotto Wall for fun.

Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

For short term relaxation, I take a hot tub. It's my best way to unblock writers' block, too. For a bit longer relaxation, I enjoy camping. Just being in the wilderness, with no phones or computers or anything I have to do really refreshes my spirit.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

If you are in a movie theater, you can look two people down and they are laughing while you are laughing or you can look three people down and they love that song that you love. It is living proof that you are not alone.

Hope is not a form of guarantee; it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

The good old days are now.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

I spend a lot of time outlining before I write the first word.

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'

Because publishing is becoming more business-oriented each day with more examination of the bottom line, it's harder to break out than ever.

Our hours in love have wings; in absence, crutches.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.

Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.