Quote collection
167 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how an accountant walks, talks, smells - although not in the business community. For me it is a career that offers a lot of variety and challenges and I love it."
"How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard."
"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong."
"You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility."
"You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again."
"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."
"I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive."
"I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones."
"I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk."
"You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent."
"This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you."
"I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to."
"Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them."
"Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline."
"It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning."
"We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper."
"Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind."
"Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more"
"Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when."
"Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself"