John Quotes

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

My brain is sending poison to my heart.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.

Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.

A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.