One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.
The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.
You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.
It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you're going to sleep better. ' Well, as with everything, he was right. . . . Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You're just alive. That's all you know. And it's bliss, it's absolute bliss.
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
You're like this little blip of light that lasts for a very brief time and you can shine as brightly as you choose.
In another time and place, she might have felt differently, but thinking along those lines was pointless now.
He squeezes my hand, and my heart punches against my ribs. It's just like pain, this pleasure.
I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.