Alison Quotes

One needs to be on guard against expecting external powers to decide when you can take yourself seriously as an artist. It can be a long wait - and lead to endless appetite.

My first memory is on a ship from California back to Sydney. Water is just a natural place of home and not home.

I suppose you retire from trying. If you retire from trying, you think, "Maybe love will just come my way if I don't want it anymore."

I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.

For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.

Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

I know perfectly well that you can't not want anything and live.

I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.

What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it's not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.

You have to want something or you're finished.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of writing a letter.

I know that I was able to find my way out of most of my feelings by writing.

I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception.

Celebrities do look different in real life from our images of them - there is a big gap. And that is what my work is about: the gap between the image and the celebrity themselves.

A lot of people who look at my photographs think it is an easy joke, but it does take a bit of thinking about.

I think sometimes to still be angry is appropriate, but you want to be able to live with it.

Human consciousness becomes a terrible gift which challenges the power that gave it.

Sometimes there isn't a way to hug and make everything better.

I've always wanted to figure out how to do a walking story. I'd never figured out how to do one and have it work or be interesting or have anything that it's about.

That's what perfect means. You're finished.

I don't think you can have an imagination without having fantasy, and you can't have that rich a life without an imagination.

In order to have a real life of any romance, there has to be a level of fantasy.

You can sometimes find something good on the other side of doing something very, very painful.

There's a lot of water in everything I've ever written. There's always oceans and pools.

I grew up flying over oceans and moving and sailing.

I do some messing around with things, not necessarily about me but about place and people and the things around.

I think you translate emotion better when you take your hands off.

Early in the phase of being in a female body, there's all this desire that comes at you, a lot of it hostile, a lot of it dangerous, a lot of it ruinous.

I sometimes think that we expect too much resolution in this world.

People are always very nice.

I grew up in a school that had a big music program, and it was incredible. It's what I looked forward to during the day. I had chorus, strings, band.

I never had any big dreams about doing something on a huge scale.

To keep an active mind, I find that reading novels is really good.

I can't even vote in America!

We had so much fun together as friends that I suggested we [with Kate DiCamillo] write a book together.

We pulled them [ Bink & Gollie] out of our feeble little brains.

Sitting out of politics isn't really an option if you don't want things to slide.

I like to write in all different genres. I just like a new challenge.

Kate [DiCamillo] tends to be more reluctant about change. I convinced her to give it a try and she came over.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.

The best thing about serial drama - especially about screwball comedy - is blocked love.

Secrets are great for acting. Secrets are the best thing in the world for acting, because they keep you looking like you have something in the back of your mind.

There are certain relationships that just don't fit into "good" or "bad"; they transcend it.