John Quotes

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.

Some people are oil and water.

I wouldn't have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard - I'd have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.

She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.

No headboards were broken.

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)

What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people's blood. No, it was that she might push him away.

He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.

Because you're my friend, wingnut.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.

For so I created them free and free they must remain.

Freedom is not from the outside. It's of the inside.

The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.

When a man plans, a woman laughs.

Asked who attacked America on 9/11, [Sarah Palin] suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein.

You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.

until only infinity remained of beauty

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

We profit little by books we do not enjoy.

Four rehabs meant a fifth was somewhere down the road.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places for places in the world where misfits were welcome.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?

The trick, of course, is to lose one day and come back to win the next. But that is possible only when we draw healthy pleasure and confidence from our creative processes.

Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.