Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.' "

Related Quotes:

" Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves? "

" When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor. "

" I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash. "

" I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books. "

" None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world. "

" The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams. "

" If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'. "

" I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense. "

" Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life. "

" I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian. "

" Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed. "

" The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them. "

" I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that. "

" Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid. "

" I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art. "

" Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business. "

" There are no rules in art. "

" When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences. "

" We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people. "

" In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath. "

" Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct. "

" Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose. "

" In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world. "

" If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York. "

" We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true. "

" The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine. "

" While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.' "

" Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon. "

" There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true. "

" Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.' "