She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.
Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.
His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.
Your American, you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.
I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else.
I have never begun a novel which wasn’t going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
I’m interested in where we are, where we’re going, where we’ve come from.
The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it’s there every day when we look out the window.
I’m always the one with the activist friends. I’ve been an activist very little.
Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.
If you ever read one of my books I hope you’ll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you’ll have to do that too.
And it’s always possible that you will not get a nice review. So – and that’s enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can’t talk back, and it’s sort of shaming in a way.
Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.
Living where I live New York I don’t think anyone’s going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it’s of your place and means that you aren’t forgotten; someone’s noticed what you have been doing with your life.