Quote collection
389 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There were a zillion bad jobs. That doesn't exist any more. I mean, I could wake up one afternoon with zero money and know that by the end of the day, I would have money."
"The thing you love right away, don't do it, because that's the very thing that's going to be your addiction for the rest of your life."
"Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you're eating dinner."
"I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways."
"Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course - he dies, I have to listen to it."
"Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing."
"In New York, people are very overbooked.You say, When do you want to have dinner? It's May. They say, What about October? And then they complain: Oh you can't believe how booked up I am."
"There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air."
"Nothing lasts. So it's my belief, yes, I know a lot of the things that we liked didn't last, but maybe things we don't like, they're also not going to last. There has been progress in my lifetime. There are certainly things that are better than when I was young, and there are things that are worse. New York City, it's worse. There's no question."
"People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction."
"Smoking is, as far as I'm concerned, the entire point of being an adult."
"Children are much less annoying [than adults] and they never start trends."
"Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness."
"There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything."
"Bread that must be sliced with an axe is bread that is too nourishing."
"I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties."
"American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that's not at all what fit means."
"Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be."
"People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this."
"If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down."