Novelists From The United States

"No matter which images of battle and carnage came to haunt him, no matter which specific terror rose up through them, the lessons they rehearsed were always the same: There’s no such thing as certainty. Control is an illusion. Death and destruction descend the moment you forget to watch for them. That was what two years of intermittent war had taught him. And once you learned those lessons, you didn’t just remember them: you lived them, moment to moment."

"And over the many months that followed, as Caine crept through both terrestrial and alien undergrowth on missions to reclaim some of the autonomy humanity had lost, he learned and relearned the prime lesson in common to all the shocks: That all assumptions, like all plans, or never more than a second away from a catastrophic collision with reality."

"People believe what they need to believe."

"“That’s the way it has to be for you. You’ll always be living in an FSR.” “FSR?” “Finite Subjective Reality. That’s what I call it. I ought to copyright that, in fact. You go creating a little area of control around you, until you bump into the next guy with his. A little sphere of reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, whatever you pull together. There’s no hope of sorting it out. That’s the way you live. FSR.”"

"Journeyman himself had a kind of tone deafness when it came to Eastern stuff, or at least to the Eastern stuff spouted by Westerners who fancied themselves enlightened."

"This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think."

"“OK, so he’s a producer, right?” Lucius spoke as a prosecuting attorney, nailing down established facts. “The thing about producers is that they are producing something, usually several things at once.” “He’s a liar,” said Jane. “Same thing,” said Lucius."

"Things changed, he thought. Then they didn’t. And we forgot they could again."

"He was a wretched excuse for a human being, but for an inquisitor he wasn’t half bad."

"I’d joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off."

"Architectural offices are always a good argument against architects, and Copperminer and Bayzwaite was no exception. The outer room served just about any purpose imaginable except those of walking in, talking to the receptionist, and sitting down to wait. I enacted these procedures anyhow, only I skipped sitting after taking a look at what passed for chairs. The room had been shaped from molten glass, pierced through with beams of burnished aluminum, and although several of these met in a confluence meant to suggest a seat, it didn’t look like something I’d be able to get back out of, so I let it pass."

"It was that rarity, an easy decision."

"The way to make a bundle in architecture right now was to devise new ways for people to pretend to gather while actually keeping their distance."

"You remind me of myself, once upon a time. We’re not really that different even now. We chafe at our bits—but you’re stubborn, inflexible. Stupid, finally. I’ve learned to compromise. In negotiation lies power, viability. Your inflexibility has rendered you marginal."

"He allowed himself to feel that his stubbornness was courage. Maybe it was."

"You consider yourself an outsider, a seeker of truth amidst lies, yet you’ve bought into the biggest lie that can be told. You snort it through your nose and let it run in your bloodstream."

"Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detest."

"Feeling unique is what we all have in common, it’s the thing that’s always the same."

"“Where did you come from?” asked Omidon. “I was exiled to the margin,” said Wendy sourly. “For what reason?” “Why is anyone ever exiled to the margin? For threatening the center.”"

"“Scout, that’s a good one,” said the sergeant. “Danny-boy couldn’t scout the inside of his eyelids.”"

"“Don’t try to figure me out,” I said. “It doesn’t work—I’ve tried it myself.”"

"He’s just a classic scapegoat, told people things they didn’t want to hear. There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time."

"Everett realized what was wrong with the scene. L.A. was built for cars, and without them it was bereft, a body drained of blood. Or a hive itself, only emptied. A husk."

"What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort."

"Give it up, Chaos. Sane and real only go so far these days."

"I don't plan anything out and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline it can be really stressful. The most joyful part of writing for me is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place and things finally start to make sense."

"I think that with a book, you can excavate a story so much more because you're really in the character's head and you can go into much deeper detail. In a movie, what you might spend pages describing, you can do that in a flash. But there's also a feeling that you have to really streamline a movie too so it stays on the right track. And I think I would say that there are definitely changes made, but I think that to me, the spirit of the story is there. And that was what was most important to me, was just that people walked away with the same feeling that they had when they read the books, which is just, I hope, feeling a warm-hearted, cozy feeling."

"There’s something very compelling about the immediacy and urgency of adolescence. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to first times and to how intense all of those emotions can feel in the moment. What’s interesting for me is being able to honor that and treat it with respect, and not think that because it’s about young people, it’s somehow less important of an experience."

"I'm not one of those writers that drafts out 500 pages, and then cuts a bunch of stuff, and then does new stuff on the fly. I'm just a lot more slow. And my process is every word pretty much gets used. I don't really have a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor from the books. I mean, some conversations and smaller scenes, but I don't think there's any big plot point or anything that I wrote but didn't use."

"Writing for me, 95% of the time, it's torture, because I'm basically walking through the forest blindfolded trying to feel my way through and then I'm almost there, and I can sort of take it off and then see where I'm at, and then I have to go back and sort of move things around and make sure it's all feeling cohesive. But the process itself can feel really arduous and a real struggle to get through. I think everyone has their own process and mine is particularly torturous."

"When it comes to adapting a story for film, I think being able to understand what’s being asked of you and what you offer to the process is really important, and for me, I’ve always seen it as being the emissary: being the ambassador of the fans and understanding what they want. I’ve been with these books for a long time, so I understand what it is that readers like about them, and I wanted to make sure that that was still present in the movie. It was less important to me to have details correct about setting and more about the feeling that you get when you see the film, which is, I hope, a cozy and warm feeling that makes you feel really hopeful."

"It was definitely overwhelming and surprising. Going into it, I was just hoping that the fans of the book would feel happy and that it brought the story to life in a way that satisfied them. It was really gratifying to see so many people embrace it who were being introduced to it for the first time."

"Well, I don’t ever plan anything in my books. Since I don’t outline, I tend to just go wherever my imagination leads me and where I feel excited to write about. I tend to write scenes that I would want to read."

"Immigrant parents don’t want their children to suffer or have to live harder than they did."

"What I would say is, don’t even look at a screen. Get a notebook and pen. For me, I always prefer to start writing with a pen. For me, the blank page is just a possibility. It’s like, "What can I feel on this page?" That’s really exciting. But if I look at the blank page, it feels like pressure. With a notebook, you can scribble down whatever you want and you can move things around the page. It’s never really gone. You can always find it again. It feels a little less free for me on a computer. I guess that would be my tip. Just start really organically with paper and a pen."

"I don’t outline anything in advance. That can be really scary. I liken it to walking blindfolded. I’m trying to head towards somewhere, but I have no idea how to get there. I don’t write in order, either. I’m taking things as they come, following my fancy."

"Advice ought to be all about the patient, and that means, I know, that I shouldn't withhold good advice even in situations where I haven't been able to follow it myself. My patients are entitled to my knowledge and understanding rather than my backsliding—to my strengths, shall we say, rather than my weaknesses."

"For many practicing pediatricians, the imperative keeps coming back to the exam room. Recently, in the pediatric outpatient clinic at Bellevue Hospital, which has served the poor of New York City since 1736, I saw a toddler who was seriously overweight, and I tried to talk with his mother about ending the practice of nighttime milk bottles. The mother became very distressed when I broached the subject of the child’s weight, and the risk of severe dental caries. She knew it all — she had already been through dental procedures for her son, she was worried about the family history of diabetes and the risks associated with obesity. But if she didn’t give her son a milk bottle, he would cry — loudly and at length — and his crying at night disturbed the other people sharing the apartment, who all had to get up early for work or school. She was clearly worried that following my advice might mean losing her living situation, which was already tenuous. The toddler in my exam room was already suffering from some of the chronic diseases — obesity, dental caries — that are part of the medical risk of poverty."

"Change can come slowly in medical practice—unless of course it comes in a sudden and absolute flurry of discovery, evidence-based recommendations, and new standards of care. But the kind of change that is based on consensus, on slowly dawning realization, or just on revamping ingrained habits can be slow indeed—it has not proved easy, for example, or even doable, to get physicians to expand our role by screening regularly and consistently for maternal depression, home firearm safety, or domestic violence."

"When I write about medicine, I write about patients, always trying to pin down the complicated pieces of other people's lives that go spinning past me. As a resident, exhausted beyond belief, I would come home and sit down and write the story of a surprising patient encounter, a hospital moment that I felt I would never forget. A month or two later I would look at the reference and the child would have slipped my mind completely, displaced by the parade of children and families and conversatioins and exam-room encounters and unfolding medical histories."

"Driving down child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human achievement, at least for pediatricians and parents."

"The safest way to transport a sick newborn, so hospital wisdom goes, is when it is still inside its mothers."

"My favorite scene is the one I’m shooting at the moment. When people ask me which of my movies is my favorite, I always say, “the next one”. Perhaps the same is true of every scene. The next one is perfect. It is finished in my mind without a flaw. Untainted by the reality of time running out, actors forgetting their lines, light dropping fast, wagon stuck in the mud or mismatched piece of clothing that must be found and brought to set."

"Education is considered the peculiar business of women; perhaps for that very reason it is one of the worst-paid business in the world; the salaries of men who engage in it are double those of women, who do better work and more of it."

"I’ve always looked at life through the lens of a non-Filipino."

"Like many American born Asian-Americans, I wanted to assimilate as a child. I wanted to fit in. As I grew older, I realized that instead of fitting in, why not stand out?"

"I always wanted to be an author. I thought it was the coolest job. As a child of immigrant parents, it wasn't ever something that they promoted. They always wanted me to do something practical."

"...There is a lack of diversity in publishing—authors and books—so if you want to write that book about growing up as a Filipino in the States, or a culture that you find interesting, do it now. Publishing is hard enough, and we need to take advantage of opportunities when we can."

"I considered myself white, having grown up essentially American but with Filipino parents. I don’t speak with an accent and I barely speak Tagalog. So, for most of my life, I looked at the world as a ‘white’ person."

"You can’t lead bunny lives and write tiger poetry."