16 quotes found
Novelist · American
American novelist
“All writers have their own pet commandments.”
“The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.”
“The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.”
“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”
“Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah ...”
“The part of the brain that isn't automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feelings: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that pus...”
“At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly.”
“What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of be...”
“I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emo...”
“The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on gia...”
“After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani...”