John Quotes

It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

Communication comes with practice. As a leader you must speak the truth; listen for understanding; and learn from what you hear and do not hear.

Leadership is the behavior each of us exerts when we take responsibility for our actions and their consequences.

Focusing on one's own purpose is a matter of considering what you want to do, why you want to do it, and how you will do it. Easy questions, but they do provide deep thought.

Leadership embraces activism; it is the outcome of a purposeful pursuit of goals.

Why should we break up Our snug and pleasant party? Time was made for slaves, But never for us so hearty.

Contentment is a pearl of great price

I've not got a first in philosophy without being able to muddy things pretty satisfactory.

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

I am the worst judge of my books.

I think everyone always has time to suffer.

If you look at the last decade of global temperature, it's not increasing.

Marti wasn't the type to give up without a fight, especially not if she was very afraid - some people are like that. They lean into the fear.

I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Which is not an easy thing for a teacher to admit to.

There's a rule or something that if a girl can crack you up, you have to do what she says.