Quote collection
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"By far the best cure for hangovers is not drinking excessively the night before.This cure has a 100% success rate, and as you save the cost of the drinks you would have otherwise drunk, it is cheaper than free."
"Like everyone, I'm saddened and horrified by this. All I'll say is that I'm personally trying to pay more attention to the victims than to their murderer. I certainly will not be mentioning the murderer. I don't think he warrants our attention-particularly since he so clearly wanted it."
"When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable."
"We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?"
"You can't just make me different and then leave. You can't. You can't change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave."
"I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck . . . only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was . .. .seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating."
"There are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told 'College Me' that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would've been like, "That is not a word, and it never should be.""
"Do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven't already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can't eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions."
"This is it. I can't even not smoke anymore"
"That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep."
"She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago."
"If I could just stay alive for a week, I’d know the unwritten secrets of Anna’s mom and the Dutch Tulip Guy."
"Facts, even false ones, cannot be copyrighted."
"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed. 'So that's Sara,' I said. 'Yes.' 'She seems nice."
"One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else."
"Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true."
"When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people."
"My interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable. My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience - how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us."
"We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them."
"I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story."