Anna Quindlen Quotes

Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.

We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.

I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.

I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.

Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

I've always had a certain facility with words.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.

It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become, after a while, simply the way things are.

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed to a whole raft of wits.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that is one is male and the other female.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough, ' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'