38 quotes found
“Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.”
“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.”
“Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.”
“People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.”
“A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play tragedy while you're living it.”
“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be in...”
“Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.”
“It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.”
“Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though th...”
“America rather, the United States seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted,...”
“I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense...”
“A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.”
“Where are you going this hot day, Mis DeJong?Selina sat up very straight. To Bagdad, Mrs. Pool.ToWheres that? What for?To sell my jewels, Mrs. Pool. And to see Aladdin, and Harun-al-Rashid and Ali ...”
“[She had] a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps pai...”
“That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.”
“It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.”
“About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.”
“But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”
“Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung f...”
“Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.”
“If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.”
