“Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 177 of 303
“If you're doing a good job as author, then you get the reader to engage in whatever speculation might be called for. And it's much more meaningful for the reader, if he or she comes up with the questions.”
“The thing is, about a character, it's not about being right, it's about the truth. The truth comes from within, so you have to search as an artist for the truth.”
“You know the value of every article of merchandise, but if you don't know the value of your own soul, it's all foolishness.”
“Hollywood is so strange because a lot of times the battlefield is just a meeting. It's not necessarily like an audition. They've seen clips of you and they know that you can perform and it's a matter of "what is your take on a character"?”
“Listen to presences inside poems.”
“I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.”
“How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?”
“The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.”
“I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up.”
“I'm pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people's bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.”
“I think about things to put them in a place where I don't have to think about them anymore. Say if I had a child with a really bad mom, I would have to think more than if I had a child with a good mom. I'm just doing my homework early.”
“I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.”
“You go to any town, any city, any state in America and there's always a McDonald's. In a lot of places around the world, it's almost the same thing. And Nikki Giovanni was like, "Damn, where are we keeping all these cows?" And it made me think to myself, like, "Damn, where are we keeping all these cows?!" It makes me think that the beef we're eating isn't even close to being real. There can't even be enough cows in the whole world just to sustain the appetites of just Americans! I'll always remember that.”
“The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.”
“Almost everybody can be imagined as either a cat or a dog.”
“The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.”
“I think sometimes there's a lot of subliminal messaging in everything.”
“The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.”
“We should wash our dirty linen at home.”