Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

Related Quotes:

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "

" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "

" I'm a dull person. "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "

" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "

" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "