Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I don't know that I'd call myself an optimist. "

Related Quotes:

" I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I'm quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there's been a good degree of self-sabotage. "

" I am increasingly unimpressed by works of art that require a college degree to understand. I think that art should be for everyone. And people should be moved by it. "

" After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times. "

" The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing. "

" I've fallen in love in my life a few times. It's the most exciting part of being alive - that I've experienced, anyway. "

" I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great. "

" When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself. "

" I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth. "

" The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling. "

" The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there's no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social. "

" I have a paranoia that 'Ablutions' is the best thing I'll ever do. "

" When you're 8 years old, and you've become subconsciously familiar with the layout and design of Black Sparrow books, and you know the difference between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, something is bound to stick. "

" Working in a bar was a horrific idea for me. "

" By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent... but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped. "

" Many's the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death. "

" Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them. "

" It's healthy to have interests besides books. "

" I am a homebody, something that lends itself to my profession. "

" I am a bit prudish, I think. It's hard for me to write about sex, and I don't really care to read about it, either. "

" When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble. "

" I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor. "

" I was reading my son some fables; it made for good nighttime reading. These stories were very vivid and very strange and occasionally bizarrely violent. It was a very free landscape. "

" A lot of my favourite books - I should say, not much happens in the books! It's much more about the points of view of the author more than anything else. "

" I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours. "

" I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes. "

" I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years. "

" Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work. "

" All the books I was reading as a teenager were about individuals having adventures. So I thought that was what writers were supposed to do: to go out on the road. "

" The idea is this: It's important to upset one's work habits, to topple the cart for each project. "

" I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers. "