• Aleksandar Hemon
  • "All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is."
• Carolyn Heilbrun
  • "Women are encouraged to be concerned with their physical attractiveness; for that reason it requires great courage to ignore one’s appearance and reach out, as it were, from behind it to attract and spellbind: it also requires great talent."
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • "In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party." (from "The Rich Boy")
  • "I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart." (from "The Rich Boy")
• Hamilton Nolan
  • "It kind of reminds you of a country called America where everything was going fine and everyone was dressing up fancy and then all of a sudden one day we all showed up to work and noticed, hey, all the money is gone. But we weren’t about to tear off our clothes and go screaming through the dark streets because that would have been unseemly. So we sort of sat around and looked embarrassed in our business suits while all our money evaporated and Greek unemployment ran to 12% and everyone in France went on strike and all the crappy Rust Belt regions languished forever and the tomato pickers went bananas over a measly penny a pound. And we just sort of sat around in the corner, trying not to call attention to ourselves, unsure what to do next, but sure that it shouldn’t be anything drastic. Life is like that sometimes. You show up to the party and everyone’s already dead. All you can do is make the best of it.”
• Jonathan Franzen
  • "I don't think there's a more pure gratitude than the one I felt toward a stranger who twenty years earlier had cared enough about herself and about her art to produce such a perfectly realized book." (from "Perchance to Dream")
  • "The real problem is that the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structured to avoid precisely the kinds of conflicts on which fiction, preoccupied with manners, has always thrived." (from "Perchance to Dream")
  • "Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading--to reconnect to that community." (from "Perchance to Dream")
  • "Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it." (from "Perchance to Dream")
• Pearl S. Buck
  • "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
• Theophile Gautier
  • "Ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously."
• William Gaddis
  • "What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around."
• Colum McCann
  • “I believe in the democracy of story-telling. I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries.  I feel humbled by the notion that I’m even a small part of the literary experience.  I grew up in a house, in a city, in a country shaped by books.  I don’t know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story.  They’re the only thing we have that can trump life itself.” 

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