Novelists From The United States

"He saw it all summed up in the blind marching of that nameless unit. A vision of gaunt shapes, sharp shiny steel, dim lamps flaring in the rain. The war machine was rolling."

"They had taken no more than a dozen steps away from the cottages when a musket barrel came smashing through an unbroken window in one of the cottages ahead. The door flew open, three more muskets poked out. The muskets boomed, killing two of the surprised soldiers a yard to Orry's left."

"He was just a lieutenant of the line, a small cog in an immense machine. Besides, all that really mattered to him was doing his job and surviving."

"I got a clear impression that he'd cheerfully send off a regiment to be butchered if it served his purpose. He wouldn't think twice about it, either. He called soldiers "interchangeable parts.""

"Iron can destroy anything: families, fortunes, governments, whole countries. It's the most powerful stuff in the universe." "Oh?" Orry's skeptical glance fell down on the Plain below. "You really think it's more powerful than a big army?" "Without weapons - without this - there are no big armies."

"Playing the lottery is gambling, and I'm not a gambler. I assessed my life, knew I wanted to become a successful writer, and believed that I had a winner for a story. All I imagined was getting a huge publishing deal and attending the premier of my movie. In fact, every time my wife and I went to the movies, I'd tell her that, one day, we'll be in a theater in Hollywood watching MEG. Does that mean that I wasn't scared? Of course not. The process is similar to crawling out on a limb of a very high tree. You know you're out there and that it's a huge drop if you fall. Out along the weakest branches grows the fruit. If you really intend on making it all the way out to the fruit, you can't hold onto the trunk, you have to let go. At the same time, you have to be smart enough not to look down (negatives), which, of course, everyone you know is screaming at you to do. If you don't want to fall, then keep looking at the fruit. This all may sound hooky, but it works and it's how I've chosen to live my life, ever since I was 13 years old."

"I have been a storyteller from a very young age. Both my grandfathers took me on their laps when I was little and either recited epic poetry or told me firsthand adventure stories from their youths. It instilled in me a sense of wonder, and I’ve been wanting to pass along that same sense of wonder ever since."

"I have written a few short stories for different venues, but I don’t see a big market in writing collections of short stories—at least not enough to sustain a living. Short stories are great for writing, but this is how I earn a living."

"I doubt myself every day. I think most writers do. It’s part of the process. It’s in part what keeps you trying to write better each day, each book. If you were ever completely satisfied, I think you might just move on to something else. So you persevere. My bandmate, Stephen King, says successful writing is 5% talent, 5% luck, and 90% perseverance. You hit walls, reviews, dead-ends, editors, trends, and you wake up in the morning and keep going. You write for the joy of writing. It’s the best job in the world. I never—never—take this opportunity for granted. I try to earn it every day I’m in the chair."

"It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war."

"In any case, the idea that somehow liberals are responsible for bringing on right-wing authoritarianism is of a piece with the domestic abuser's refrain "Look what you made me do." Or, for that matter, with the idea that antisemitism would not exist if Jews did not provoke their own persecution."

"A document, recently released—“LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report of the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting,” to give it its official name—offering the local-police-department summary of the Las Vegas gun massacre of last year... The report takes on the supposedly baffling question of Paddock’s motive, and what comes through is that—unless some astonishing new connection or fact appears in the future—his intention appears to have been purely nihilistic. Paddock wanted to kill a lot of people because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Feelings of frustration and insufficient power, the frequent ignition of such killings, may have moved him, too, and yet they seem to have been more unrooted than such feelings usually are among mass killers. He came from a troubled family, but had managed to acquire money, a girlfriend, an occupation. Basically, it seems to have been an item on his bucket list. He knew that the one thing he could do before he died was murder a lot of people. Why did he want to kill a lot of people? Because he wanted to kill a lot of people. So, he Googled any number of cheerful outdoor concerts, in California and Chicago and also in Las Vegas, and made reservations at hotels looking down on them, and kept buying weapons of mass murder, and finally, there he was, a little god of death."

"As satirists have pointed out for millennia, civilized behavior is artificial and ridiculous: it means pretending to be glad to see people you aren’t glad to see, praising parties you wished you hadn’t gone to, thanking friends for presents you wish you hadn’t received. Training kids to feign a passion is the art of parenting. The passions they really have belong only to them."

"Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard."

"The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct."

"Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once."

"Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation."

"We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now."

"Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry."

"Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all."

"What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle."

"What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition won, the reward secured."

"With all the effort in the world, the results of cramming kids are likely to be more ambiguous than we can predict, not because the child rearing was done wrong but because all such results tend to be ambiguous."

"We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance."

"We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood — but, then, that was Mozart’s childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart."

"There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them."

"[M]ath prodigies are set somewhat apart from the more general-capacity prodigies, being seemingly possessed of a weird bit of wiring more than an over-all enhanced capacity for learning to do things."

"We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans."

"So there is no need to amend the Constitution, or to alter the historical understanding of what the Second Amendment meant. No new reasoning or tortured rereading is needed to reconcile the Constitution with common sense. All that is necessary for sanity to rule again, on the question of guns, is to restore the amendment to its commonly understood meaning as it was articulated by this wise Republican judge a scant few years ago. And all you need for that is one saner and, in the true sense, conservative Supreme Court vote. One Presidential election could make that happen."

"The tragedy happens—yesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will again—exactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the President—his growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mourner—has now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles—not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it’s been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won’t allow that to change, and the party won’t allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns."

"A new study by Adam Lankford, of the University of Alabama, which will be presented next week at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association, shows a strong correlation between the availability of guns and the prevalence of gun massacres. With the same certainty that David Hemenway’s work established the link between the number of guns in a society and the number of gun killings, we now know that there is a correlation between the availability of guns and the major public assaults that have been a part of American life since Columbine."

"The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country--Canada, Norway, Britain--has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do--as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue."

"The truth is made worse by the reality that no one--really no one--anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life."

"The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were OK. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling — dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief — is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened — specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people — and why it happens over and over again in America."

"If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe."

"No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing."

"As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth."

"“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”"

"I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss."

"There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us."

"Choose again."

"If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony."

"Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that."

"I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth."

"If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved."

"“Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere...consensual idiocy.”"

"These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women."

"While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe."

"“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives.”"

"“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe."