On My Way Quotes

I fall in love with characters when they're out of their element or are uncomfortable and you really feel for them in a knee-jerk sympathetic way.

I want to become less and less about the laptop. That's what's lovely about an orchestra - the physicality, the way every gesture relates to something you're hearing.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Worry is spiritual nearsightedness, a fumbling way of looking at little things, and of magnifying their value.

There's no right or wrong - I think people can be messy in a very soulful way. The point in the end is to make people feel something, and there's so many different ways to do that.

What I do isn't radical. It's just distinct in small ways.

The Tudors was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.

In some ways, what I need is a wife.

I suppose [...] that the most convincing way to fool an enemy would be to fool a friend.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

Think about it. He drinks poison. What kind of man drinks poison? She is the one who stabs herself with his dagger. The manly way.

I... keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if... if only there were no other people in the world.

Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.

Who knows, perhaps he doesn't care about me at all and look at the others in just the same way.

I always think I'm terrible. So it's always a relief when I find out that I wasn't. I've had roles where I realized that I was in way over my head - and that is my biggest fear.

If you're with someone who enjoys having people play hard to get, maybe that's the way you're supposed to do it then.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.

Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

The world has been forced to its knees. Unhappily, we seldom find our way there without being beaten to it by suffering.

I shall pass Dawn on her way to earth, as I seek for a path through space.

I can't get very far away from Christianity, I can't get very far away from the angels and the saints. I work them in always, in some way.

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.

Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

‎There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.

Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.