Quote collection
31 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information."
"That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely."
"The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit."
"When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair."
"You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it."
"I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again."
"Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?"
"Life is a means of extracting fiction."
"I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging."
"It's all about letting the story take over."
"If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell."
"The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew."
"The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry."
"I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more."
"I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America"
"One does not consider style, because style is."
"If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about."
"I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway."
"I start early in the morning. I'm usually out in the woods with the dog as soon as it gets light; then I drink a whole lot of tea and start as early as I can, and I go as long as I can."
"There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’"