Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

Related Quotes:

" If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is. "

" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "

" Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level. "

" In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. "

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

" When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself. "

" Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made. "

" It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. "

" I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears. "

" The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are. "

" Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. "

" As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off. "

" You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. "

" Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. "

" I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish. "

" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. "

" A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice. "

" My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other. "

" I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. "

" When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate. "

" I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them. "

" When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. "

" I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents. "

" 'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it? "

" Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced. "

" I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. "

" I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going. "

" I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work. "

" There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier. "