Al Smith Quotes

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."

I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.

I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.

Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

You're a library of me.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

I really do not understand the members of my generation.

I feel less connected with Millennials than ever.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

I must give you this warning: your journeys will rarely ever go as you plan. You will make mistakes, and you will feel lost. Whenever that happens, look to the light and keep moving forward in faith.

In the quiet of the graveyard, the couple knelt together in soul-stretching silence—wishing, waiting, hoping, praying.

Willpower, though important in its own way, is never enough. In order for you to be truly powerful, you must open up and trust in something beyond yourself—something you cannot prove for certain.

Have faith in the light you carry.

Faith is believing in something you cannot prove for certain.

Always go as far as you can see, then let faith take you the rest of the way.

And so I tell you, restless one, that no matter what happens, when things get dark, look to the light and keep moving forward in faith.

Where does your soul walk? Does it walk in the sunlit woods or hide in the shadowy forest?

Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them.

I didn't just see a child in my dreams—I felt it in my heart.

Where does your soul walk?

All churches are an echo of this—the Cathedral of Nature.

To love the creations of the Earth is to worship the Being who created them.

Darling, I would follow you through the blackest midnight—just not without my trousers!

One human life is worth more than all the treasures of the earth.

Our home is a belonging place.