Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Everything I have ever written about has been about what's going on inside of us. "

Related Quotes:

" Love is the same as like except you feel sexier. "

" All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that. "

" I wrote 'And Two Boys Booed' several years ago, but we really chased around looking for the perfect illustrator, so it took a while. "

" I like to take all my feelings and thoughts and put them down in different ways on paper. "

" Most of the characters I have in my children's books are grouchy or annoyed about something or are calling each other unfriendly names. Like my own kids, they're not honeys and sweetie pies and little angels. They're kids. Sloppy, dirty, stinky. "

" When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead. "

" My Girl Scout leader. She told me if I listened more and talked less, I could grow up to be a good writer. I thought that was interesting advice at age 12. "

" My mother was born in June and later, feeling a vacancy, chose her birth month for her middle name. Marry to marry, had kids because that's what was done. Liked crossword puzzles, liked lilac trees, liked baking in the sun, and liked Bing Crosby. "

" The best I can do is, it's like a 'ding!' You're writing, and then something starts falling into place, and you hear or feel a ding. And it just feels - it's going to be okay. "

" It's very hard when I've seen a couple of people very beloved in my life with terrible degenerative diseases. "

" Don't let anything sneak past you. Don't say, 'Well, oh, I'll take a picture and put it in my photograph album.' I notice it now. I love it now. And I am grateful for it now. "

" Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood? "

" Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced. "

" Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you. "

" My favorite was 'The Secret Garden'. I loved it, and I think it's had a big influence on all of my characters. 'The Secret Garden' is about transgressions and imperfect people. "

" The years that remain are clearly limited. When you're 80, you attend a lot more funerals. A lot more people are having a hard time and are ill. "

" Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect. "

" Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces. "

" My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience. "

" I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too. "

" My mother was a huge, huge reader. I think I picked up very early how precious it was to write things in books and have people like my mother glued to the page. "

" 'Alexander, Who's Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever' was inspired by a combination of my grandson, my son, and myself - all those times when each of us has decided that we're just not going to get into trouble anymore. But it's so hard to be good all of the time! "

" I had lived with my mother in anger and love - I suppose most daughters do - but my children only knew her in one way: As the lady who thought they were smarter than Albert Einstein. As the lady who thought they wrote better than William Shakespeare. As the lady who thought every picture they drew was a Rembrandt. "

" My mother would have been so crazy about my grandchildren. She was a fabulous grandmother, and she would have been absolutely crazed as a great-grandmother. I miss that part of her. "

" You could never plan your life in a million years. "

" I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife's husband. "

" In history class, I wrote a poem, 'The Royalists and the Roundheads.' I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it. "

" If I could pick one reason why I want to be a writer, it would be connection. In all kinds of ways, I like to be individual and distinct; but when I write, I want to be writing about things that connect me to the people for whom I write. "

" We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong. "

" A rebel. That was me when I was younger. What was a rebel from New Jersey? A rebel was moving to the Village, not sleeping with top sheets, not eating a hot breakfast in the morning, not having 20 rolls of toilet paper and 10 boxes of Kleenex. "