Wally Lamb Quotes

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

With destruction comes renovation.

I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

I'm a very rooted person. I grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, I still live in Connecticut.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.

What if I don’t like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I am a plodder, I make an appointment with my computer everyday and I have no idea where I am going.

I work hard, do my best and send it out to the world hoping that people can relate to it. I accept any reaction and hope they think it is worth reading.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

Connecticut is in my blood.