Quote collection
71 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon."
"If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive."
"I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me."
"God bless the Reference Librarians"
"There is no higher form of artistic expression then film"
"In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed.Or maybe not."
"I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America.""
"Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work."
"If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?"
"I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?" The Glass Rainbow, p. 138"
"I think all good narration contains an element of mystery and suspense. If it didn't, if the storyline were predictable, we would have no interest in reading it."
"We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others."
"THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation."
"The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision."
"Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch."
"If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next."
"And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place."
"But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value."
"The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us."
"Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself."