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Quotes by Writer
"The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse."
"Because I've gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing."
"Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life."
"it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress ."
"Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe."
"We had made the error of staying small and there is no more unforgivable crime in America."
"College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts."
"A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America."
"Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics."
"I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well."
"We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game."
"The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism."
"To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does."
"If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they're fortunate and lucky beyond anyone's imagination. It remains a shock to me that I've had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I'd written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I've managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder."
"You must appreciate beauty for it to endure."
"I do not think I was a hotheadnot then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life."
"Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry."
"I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic."
"...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand..."
"Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny."
"But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention."
"It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks."
"In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them."
"I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home."
"Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself."
"The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly."
"The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered."
"A library could show you everything if you knew where to look."
"I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit."
"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
"Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next."
"The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it."
"Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive."
19
"The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain."
"True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful."
"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
"How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?"
"Writing is the continuation of politics by other means."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
"Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being."
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