Quote collection
345 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"
"Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else."
"K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget."
"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables."
"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."
"I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a fuzzy navel."
"It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know."
"Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."
"To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish"
"An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."
"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase."
"Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still."
"I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion."
"God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about."
"Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers."
"The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.""
"Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense."
"Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret."
"Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get."
"You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it's needed ... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry."