Johnny Rich Quotes

To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.

He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.

To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is.

Silent is an anagram of listen.

Nothing is over our heads if we hold them high enough.

Because he believed in himself, he believed what he did was important. Or maybe it was the other way around.

I stare out at the real world projected on the windows

I’ve often been criticised, but never critically wounded

His suffering was no more real than he was.

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.

I feel underslept but overjoyed. Nothing feels so good as this.

You know, sometimes I even envy myself.

The silence was pregnant with noise, with muted fury, with questions the father found too disgusting to frame and with answers to which the son was incapable of giving voice.

I guarantee it will change your life, but only because everything does, however small.

Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script.

All life is preoccupied with death. Death is the only certain future. Yet in the face of reason, everyone holds out hope for the highly improbable.

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

Wouldn’t a no one do as well as a someone about whom nothing can be said?

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

The only simple truth is that there is nothing simple in this complex universe. Everything relates. Everything connects

Is cruelty still cruel if it is necessary? Is cruelty still cruel if it is part of a lie?

These are the things you don’t say, even to someone you love.

In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.

The future is certain. It is just not known.

This pain is comfort. It is the solace of physicality, like a touch.

He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.

So, my sweet, did it put the fun into funeral?

There’s no such thing as probability, " she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.

So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.

Even when I press against him his presence is too far away.

That small difference made all the difference.

I’m a bit-part actor in my own life

Rejection is no badge of honour.

Adam & Eve have been degraded, reduplicated forever, photocopies of photocopies, mistakes copied, magnified, augmented.

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book

Grief denied will surface in borrowed clothes, the mad, sad clothes of paranoia, fear or loneliness

Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.

Reality, it seems, is not a flat plane, but has as many veils as an onion has skins.

For someone to be perfect, they must be real, however imperfect they are.

Even Damocles developed a routine.

It is a matter of mere coincidence that there is often a real individual who corresponds with a celebrity, signifies them.

Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.

He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing

You need to bridge the gap between reality and freedom. Drugs are the bridge.