Quote collection
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It's always something very specific."
"My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes."
"It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised."
"Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt."
"Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing."
"My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things."
"I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all."
"My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated."
"Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb."
"The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs."
"One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost."
"[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness."
"I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it."
"Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose."
"A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'"
"As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University."
"Art is the highest expression of the human spirit."
"The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward."
"Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible."
"Much in our lives is chance."