Quote collection
92 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks."
"I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read."
"Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens."
"For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo."
"I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty."
"I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again."
"Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence."
"Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?"
"Poetry is prose in slow motion."
"Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for."
"In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark."
"A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in the middle of whatever is going on. The characters are having interesting, subtle interactions, or jealousies, or whatever it is, and suddenly some gigantic angry eruption has to happen, a giant gasp where everyone has to scramble around. That's the point where I'm turned off. I want the dynamic range to be a little smaller. I don't like the big false bangs."
"The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true."
"I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes."
"Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants."
"I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels."
"History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way."
"But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis."
"Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master."
"Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why."