19 quotes found
“Talent is cheap. What matters is discipline.”
“Sometimes in this life, only one or two opportunities are put before us and we must seize them no matter the risk.”
“What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?”
“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you cant drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”
“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”
“What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or - and he wished thi...”
“A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”
“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and...”
“It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, tho...”
“Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you d...”
“Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.”
“Theres something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lotIts significantBecause somebody has to take them inAnd if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do s...”
“Dont quit. Its very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and its very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You cant get fired if you dont ...”
“My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.”
“Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.”
“I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for t...”
“He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice--almost overexuberant--was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who's just been told she's ...”
“There’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot…It’s significant…Because somebody has to take them in…And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you...”
“Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you d...”
