American Author Quotations | Page 6

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me.

I tried to fit a little humour into it when I thought it was appropriate, but it just gets uglier and uglier as July 4th approaches.

It only worked for a little while; the morning after I agreed to go with Universal, an article came out in the Hollywood trade papers, and the secret was out.

It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.

Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans.

Doing a work for hire is not necessarily bad, whether it's an encyclopedia article or a tie-in novel. It's just that you get no royalties.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

Then one day I thought it would be nice to try to draw that rabbit and make a little story of it - and that's how Miffy started.

Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

The object of the law of value is to elucidate the actual exchange relations of commodities.

Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.

Each of my characters comes from somewhere, and where they come from, good or bad, has a large part in forming who they are, and who they can become.

The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work.

The basic story for the opener is that word came through the bar that someone got knifed and killed up on the Moon Walk. It turns out to be one of the quarter regulars that everybody knows, including Maestro and Bone.

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.

Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence.

It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities.

It's hard for me to talk about anything I'm doing at the moment. It's only after I finish something that I can actually describe it in words.

It's interesting that instead of having to get tighter and more restricted for a collaboration, strangely enough, from the beginning, we've actually been more confident that we could handle this.

It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections.

It wasn't anything he said; it was his whole attitude towards literature that made me realize that I could do absolutely anything I wanted to.

It was more exciting to get that first book published, I think.

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but the truth is that the Internet can be a powerful tool, both positive and negative, to a writer's career.

No man is a failure who enjoys life.

I want to create, however, a new breed, a new kind of computer system that is much simpler that allows kids to programme once again.

I view the players as entertainers. Their job is to entertain you, and although an Arizona Cardinals game might not have that effect, most of them do.

The votes of 60,000 Floridians were not counted. The Court threw out all 60,00 votes. And that's what the newspapers around the country are counting now.

The U.S. has already suffered a devastating attack on September 11, 2001, and may again become a target.

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.

There used to be a me behind the mask, but I had it surgically removed.

The sense that this world is an illusion, that desire is the root of suffering, the awareness of cause and effect-I have a great respect for all that.

The setting of the situation is really cool, and it's very interesting. Jamie is dying to do this; she loved the idea. Can't you just imagine?

I was a big comics reader when I was a kid, from about six to fifteen. I collected them, I read them, I even created my own characters in comics.

Once, I got an idea for a short story during a Halloween concert while watching someone play the bones during the performance of Dance Macabre.

After the revolution, when one person injures another, society would concern itself most immediately to give help to the person who has been injured.

After the revolution, surely the only good reason for institutions that could still be called prisons - because they take people and place them under restraint - is this reason: wanting to keep people from harming others.

It's not about divorce, it's about living. I write about life. People sometimes go. Fathers sometimes leave. It's not all fun and games.

So far I've been very lucky in that stories have come to me like a thunderstorm, unexpected, full of darkness and energy demanding all my attention.

The far more threatening problem is elsewhere - shrinking pensions, collapsed personal savings and soaring costs for health insurance.

I'm delighted. I don't know if he is, but I'm delighted to welcome him back to the show, this time here in person in our studios in L.A.

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

I like giving readers an opportunity to get a hold of me in that way and to read things I've written which might disappear otherwise.

I had spent a summer in Chicago doing community service work and loved the city, so when I finished my undergraduate degree I moved there permanently.

I had an opportunity to meet some members of the public, which I have been doing in Rangoon, too. It was very educational for me.

I'm very surprised at the high number of boys who have written to say that reading my books was hard work but worth it. I have many loyal boy readers.

I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.

I never saw a computer during that course, I merely looked at the catalogues and the magazines and here was a picture showing a map on a screen.

I'm trying to get to a point here of how much progress we've made in this business. Were you able to find that diverse crew that you wanted?

I lived for four years in the 1930s with these individuals and the only time that I wasn't thinking about dealing with physical suffering is when I was working on this book. I've never been more alive as when I worked on this book.

I'm a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four.

I had a book, which was stolen, the art of the life of the character, in which you present a whole life in three of four pages. I used that method.

If you don't go to other men funerals they won't go to yours.

If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year, the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens, including those at the bottom of the wage ladder.

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.

If you gave me 10 million dollars, I wouldn't live any differently. Although nowadays I guess you'd have to raise that to 20 million to mean anything.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is is than where anybody is.

Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.

I'll usually work until about four or five - take a short break mid day to run through the email that's come in or read and post on the boards.

I lived with them in my studio in New York. And of course if I were doing that book today or even ten years, fifteen years later, I would have gone to where the wild ducks were and where I could study them - I would have gone to the country somewhere.

I have to say my initial attraction to France, which happened on my first visit when I was a student at eighteen, was inexplicable.

In the long run, consequently, the ordinary American will have nothing irremediable to complain about except economic and social inequalities.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic.

I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.

I gave up my room on 34th St. because I had too many young callers who were unwelcome... For this reason please don't tell them where I am.

I just try to write what I want to see. I tried to do that with 'Scream' and with 'Summer.' I just try to tell a compelling story.

I really appreciated his theme of life evolving from one race of gods to another, with one power having to give way to another, as Hyperion must.

Before he went to sleep, I told him a little story about a rabbit we saw run around the beach house we rented.

Children want to do what the grownups do. Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

But whether, for example, a coat can be exchanged for twenty yards of linen cloth or for forty yards is not a matter of chance, but depends upon objective conditions, upon the amount of socially necessary labor time contained in the coat and in the linen respectively.

But if institutions of restraint might still be necessary, they should no longer be institutions of punishment at the same time.

But I don't sit down and think: this is meant for children.

But I soon learned that this was an absolute dead-end street: I would always be an American. And once I realized this, life became a joy.

How do you grow up in the shadow of a guy-I want to talk about the movie in a second-but how do you grow up in the shadow of a guy who really is a legend in his own time?

I didn't know any schizophrenics. The most valuable information I got was from people with the disease and their family members.

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

If God wants to take my left arm, that's OK, as long as I can walk and play with my kids. I'm a lot improved. I was worse than this after the accident.

I call attention to the dark side maybe a little bit for mutual catharsis but also to try to paint the universe as it is - both sides of it.

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

I do think there is passion and there is interest in hockey. Now the question is, can you translate that throughout a season. We think so.

I do write a little SF in my spare time.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I am very pleased and perhaps a little surprised also because I don't think one knows the extent of one's own work or the acceptance of it.

However, my father was a publisher and it was expected that I would become a publisher as well - in his firm.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences-and I stray pretty far from mine-I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

I completely lost interest in comics. I sold my collection. I didn't go back to them for fifteen years - until after Wonder Boys.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

For the first time in my literary career I have not gotten on the main talk shows in the morning. This year, I was turned down on all three shows.

You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense.

The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read.

All kinds of folk, as you can imagine, have had things to say-as you well know-over the last week and a half about what you said.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

The hard part about questions like this is that SF covers such a broad spectrum. There are so many authors who are good at so many different things.

The increased momentum of American life, both in its particles and its mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value.