Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
You have to have that organizational principle behind the song.
The sword conquered for a while, but the spirit conquers for ever!
If I allow the fact that I am a Negro to checkmate my will to do, now, I will inevitably form the habit of being defeated.
I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.
The main advantage of the omniscient approach is that it's the easiest to handle. That's the major reason so many writers select it.
I've always believed you can get closer to the truth by pretending not to speak it.
It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
I am not on this planet to get something done - the things we accomplish are expressions of our purpose.
But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.
I passed the Bar on the first shot, But I have never practiced law.
I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.
To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.
I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.
We'll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that?
A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure.
The temple of art is built in words.
The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.
With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office.
Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness.
It was a bright, clear afternoon in the late fall that pretty Miss Cable drove up in her trap and waited at the curb for her father to come forth from his office in one of Chicago's tallest buildings.
The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.
I hope it will be set in California. In a way, I made a mistake, because a New Jersey policeman can't operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.
The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
We have two lives the one we learn with and the life we live after that.
Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
I haven't lost faith in human nature and I haven't decided to be less compassionate to strangers.
What is art but a way of seeing?
Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.
This is unexpected... like squirt from aggressive grapefruit.
The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
I use the city because it saves time, I don't have to do a lot of research on the setting.
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
He had not yet learned that the only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires.
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
But if two's company, three's a crowd - and that demands the omniscient point of view.
If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
But whatever the POV, and the difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame, stay within it.
At that point, I sat down and made an alphabetical list of all the crime related words I could think of. So here I am now, nearly half-way through, probably tied up until the year 2015 or SO.
What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.
Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
Vesco was always on the trail in search of money.
You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you.
A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long.
Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people.
I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.
Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
I feel horribly vindicated. Three thousand people died who didn't have to die.
Violence is the first refuge of the violent.
Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.
Books are like movies of the mind and it's better to leave Kinsey where she is.
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.
Where can I get some tat? I'd like to trade it in.
The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.
The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.
But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all.
I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.
There ain't nothing from the outside that can lick any of us.
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.
It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with.
The way to a man's heart is through his chest.
But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.
A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
This would not be a problem if I were driving a snowplow.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
Henry is entirely invented though by now I feel he's as real as anyone I know.
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.
I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.
When I get back from this book tour, I'm planning to learn the internet. Maybe I can hook up in cyberspace.
Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.
It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants.
The truth is, I could no more dictate her nature than she could dictate mine. Kinsey's happy as she is and she doesn't need to be rescued, improved, or saved.
A few years ago, there were requests to me, Can we make this? I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake.
It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.