Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Novelists - Page 3

And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

It seems like whenever a big newspaper or TV show talks about teen literature, they focus on dark books or vampire books. It's kind of this cliche. It seems like the only time adults pay attention is with that angle.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Smoking kills you, but life kills you, and if you don't want to die, go into a freezer when you are born and nothing will happen to you.

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.

No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.

Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

Delicious tears! The heart's own dew.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.

I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men; they are far superior and always have been.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

You can't do extraordinary things in the world if you're spending time criticizing others because they don't look or behave the way you think they should.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.

Love is not the absence of logic but logic examined and recalculated heated and curved to fit inside the contours of the heart.

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly!

Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

Beautiful women get in Hollywood's door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they're inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

We are the hero of our own story.

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.