“Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 755 of 4756
“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.”
“There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.”
“Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.”
“Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running.”
“Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.”
“I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.”
“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.”
“The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds.”
“Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.”
“I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?”
“Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.”
“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
“I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.”
“I think subconsciously because of my upbringing, I was very aware of values and morals and that's why I experienced the occasional guilt with my habits.”
“Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.”
“There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.”
“democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.”
“I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.”
“Who shot you?" For a moment he looked annoyed. "I fail to see what that's got to do with anything. Reading assures me that anyone who's ever met me would have reason to shoot me, so I must admit with all candor that I have no idea. Was it you?" "If I'd shot you I wouldn't have missed," she said. "Was that wishful thinking or are you in fact a practiced shot?" "Desire would have made up for lack of expertise.”