Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Novelists - Page 5

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.

Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don't sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don't have to worry about that.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.

Nobody knows anything.

It's sad when you can't make everyone happy, though. It's impossible but, at the same time, you still hope. You think, 'Maybe I can do it,' but you know you can't. But gosh, if I had to rely on giving people what they wanted, I would have had to write 40 billion different books and even then, I wouldn't get it right.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.

In limits, there is freedom. Creativity thrives within structure. Creating safe havens where our children are allowed to dream, play, make a mess and, yes, clean it up, we teach them respect for themselves and others.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

I start every morning at 7 or 7:30 in the same place - my little office where it's dark and cozy - with a cup of the same really strong black coffee. It's my little cocoon. There's no phone or fax or Internet. And no music.

We have a tendency to put ourselves last, we concentrate on everything else; work, friends, family, home issues, but we ignore the deeper stuff until it becomes so compressed that it can explode.

The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.

Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistable urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex. Yippee.

People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.

Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.

I really love visiting schools - in fact, that's my favorite part of being an author now - even though I still get stage fright! When I visit schools, I know I'm going to be talking to some kids who don't like to read.

You can't pretend to be witty because wit is dry, subtle, lacerating, cynical, elitist, and risque - all impossible to fake. Humor, on the other hand, is broad, soothing, positive, inclusive, and smutty - to make sure everybody gets it. Pretending to be humorous is easy, and a great many people are doing it.

If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

I recommend the art of slow reading.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

The soul is healed by being with children.

I never wanted you to get hurt, but i wanted to take you from him.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

I've only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.

All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.

In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.