Novelists From The United States

"I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight."

"A wise psychiatrist once said to me, "People want to get better, but they don't want to change." But I would propose that it is only by allowing people born with horizontal identities not to change that one allows them to get better. Any of us can be a better version of himself, but none of us can be someone else."

"I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward."

""I'm not responsible for my child and who she's become, but I am responsible to her, and she is a wonderful person. I love her. I don't know if you need to know anything else, but that's all I need to know." --Carol"

"When parents say, "I wish my child did not have autism," what they're really saying is "I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different [nonautistic] child instead." Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces. —Jim Sinclair"

"Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state."

"Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us."

"Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis."

"We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination."

"MR HEALY: Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What's wrong with labor? A man's work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We've gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it's sure we're losing the very juice of living. BOY: The world changes, Mister Healy. The old things go, and each of us must make peace with the new."

"We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems..."

"I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real."

"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

"Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, a football players. We're in the boredom-killing business."

"You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!"

"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

"It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much."

"When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?...I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?...And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death."

"Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?"

"War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real. At least that's what you always tried to tell me, isn't it? That we shall never get rid of war by pretending it's unreal? It's the virtue of war that's the fraud, not war itself. It's the valor and the self-sacrifice and the goodness of war that needs the exposing. And here you are being brave and self-sacrificing, positively clanking with moral fervor, perpetuating the very things you detest merely to do "the right thing". Honestly, Charlie, your conversion to morality is really quite funny. All this time I've been terrified of becoming Americanized, and you, you silly ass, have turned into a bloody Englishman"

"There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle."

"MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John."

"We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices."

"You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month. You prefer lovers to husbands, hotels to homes. You'd rather grieve than live."

"You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half."

"I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be."

"I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are."

"You don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog and I'm a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna get down on my knees and I'm gonna beg that girl to marry me."

"All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain."

"CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places."

"The writer [i.e. at rehearsals] should stay away from the actors except to let them know how much he is delighted by them. Actors, like everyone else in show business, need this constant reward. Don't flatter an actor unless he deserves it, but most professional actors, if they are responsive, will give you frequent cause for praise. Other than this, don't meddle with them. Actors will always come up to the writer, if he is around at rehearsals, and try to talk their parts out with him. The writer must refer them to the director. The director has his own idea of how to approach each actor, and advice from the writer will just confuse the actor and diffuse the director's authority."

"CHARLIE: That's what marriage is, Arnold. It's a job. You work at it. You work at it twenty-four hours a day. It's your job to make that person feel happy. You have to sit and think, "How am I going to make that person feel happy?" It's your job to make that other person happy. And, if your girl is halfway decent, she's going to make it her job to make you happy. Then you get to feel, I can depend on this person. And that's love, man. That's the greatest thing in the world. There's nothing like it. Arnold, I don't know how to explain this to you . . . but that's what my wife does for me. She's the one that makes life worth living."

"OLD LADY: I'm sixty-six years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. SON-IN-LAW: Missus Fanning . . . OLD LADY; An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what? [She is beginning to cry now] Is this what it all comes to?"

"Nearby is the boss, a man in his thirties. He is bent over a machine, working on it with a screw driver. The boss is really a pleasant man; he works under the illusion, however, that gruffness is a requisite quality of an executive."

"It is my current belief that the function of the writer is to give the audience some shred of meaning to the otherwise meaningless pattern of their lives. Our lives are filled with endless moments of stimulus and depression. We relate to each other in an incredibly complicated manner. Every fiber of relationship is worth a dramatic study. There is far more exciting drama in the reasons why a man gets married than in why he murders someone. The man who is unhappy in his job, the wife who thinks of a lover, the girl who wants to get into television, your father, mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends - all these are better subjects for drama than Iago. What makes a man ambitious? Why does one girl always try to steal her kid sister's boy friends? Why does your uncle attend his annual class reunion faithfully every year? Why do you always find it depressing to visit your father? These are the substances of good television drama; and the deeper you probe into and examine the twisted semiformed complexes of emotional entanglements, the more exciting your writing becomes."

"Marty was a comment on the social values of our times."

"Most movies, even the good ones, are based upon the extraordinary incident and the exceptional character. In writing the stage play, it is necessary to contrive exciting moments of theater. Marty and The Mother are bundled together in one discussion because each represents in its own way the sort of material that does best on television. They both deal with the world of the mundane, the ordinary, and the untheatrical. The main characters are typical, rather than exceptional; the situations are easily identifiable by the audience; and the relationships are as common as people. The essence of these two shows lies in their literal reality. I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wire-tapped. I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life."

"TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?""

"Now, the word for television drama is depth, the digging under the surface of life for the more profound truths of human relationships. I cannot help but feel that this is where drama is going. People are beginning to turn into themselves, looking for personal happiness. The jargon of introspection has become everyday conversation. The theater and all its sister mediums [i.e. film; TV; books] can only be a reflection of their times, and the drama of introspection is the drama that the people want to see."

"DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . ."

"This was Norman’s remarkable ability — to imagine how highly sophisticated philosophical and critical ideas continually relate to our everyday life. This remarkable synthesis of the intellectual and the practical pervades his writing, transforming the experiences he had in the midst of western mountains and rivers into paradigms of human life and thus accomplishing the ultimate goal of fiction."

"There is not a writer in the world who will not jump with the shock of recognition when Maclean discerns iambic pentameter in the business of the whorehouse, a second epiphany when everything heard sorted itself into rhythms. … Here Maclean, at seventeen, becomes conscious of the shape of language, the way it falls on the ear. In that whorehouse, ill, dazed, and swimming in and out of consciousness, he became the writer who bloomed fifty-odd years later."

"It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him."

"A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help."

"Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts — hopefully, even the arch to the sky."

"In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them."

""From the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains," Captain Lewis said in his journals. Its singular appearance makes it a fitting backdrop for early and everlasting drama in which nature plays the leading role."

"Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story — and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story:"

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."