Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

A mix of revenge, sadness and anger funnels into a decision that’s so simple and neat, it could fit in my pocket. I will help Kudzu destroy Aevum. Just like Magnus destroyed my mother.

But maybe kissing was enough. Maybe kissing was the only thing that mattered, anyway. Maybe kissing could overcome the whole vampire/basketball thing.

Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.

If you come to a negotiation table saying you have the final truth, that you know nothing but the truth and that is final, you will get nothing.

Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

The more you get to know a person, the more attractive they become to you. Because everything beautiful you see on the inside of them, suddenly you see on the outside of them, too.

Poverty urges us to do and suffer anything that we may escape from it, and so leads us away from virtue.

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.

If we breathe the scent of goodly grass, the fragrance of spices, the aroma of good fruits, we pronounce a blessing over the pleasure.