Novelists From The United States

"My husband and I were on this protracted and tragic adoption journey. It was really hard and there were a lot of things that went wrong, so I decided while this is happening I'd write a book about it to make it more interesting as opposed to just tragic. It's definitely based on our experience, but not exactly our experience. You know, I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers [laughs]. I think I learned some things about it, how to be patient, a little bit, and I'm so hard on that narrator, that I got to see the worst of how I felt. My husband said this to me actually—he said I was taking this horrible thing that we were going through and turning it into something positive. I felt productive in that way."

"I write what I am interested in, and hope it will find an audience. I don’t know that it would make a lot of sense to do it the other way around."

"Scholes mentioned and quoted from the “Following the Plot” essay, so the first thing I did was get my hands on a copy of The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism by Penelope Fitzgerald so I could read the essay in full. I guess mostly simply, I took Fitzgerald at her word. In that essay she says letters had arrived that dangled the possibility of an inheritance, and she decided to make the trip to Mexico to see about it. She and were quite desperate at that point, living beyond their means in London, editing a failing literary journal, with two young children and a third on the way. ... Penelope and Desmond stayed together until his death in 1976. Her first novel was written to entertain him as he declined. Despite all the problems, I think they must have loved each other deeply."

"Follow your obsessions. It feels lonely and crazy sometimes, but if you believe in them other people will too, and you will create something enduring."

"But such indifference to doctrine accompanies a lassitude toward all progress. The commonfolk still tolerate appalling injustices, because to them social evils are merely steps on the pathway to moksha. How can you help people who think the wretchedness of their poor is divinely appointed?"

"“You are enjoying the present disruptions a good deal less than I. That is because I recently restructured my cerebral architecture—that skill is my raison d’être, I should explain—and have adopted an egocentric consciousness, which certainly changes one’s view of the world!” The creature laughed, a shocking sound. “I’m presently as selfish as any human; probably worse, since I am not used to this heady wine. As any infant.”"

"You may regard this as an outrage of the spirit, but it is that or die, and I decline to offer you the choice."

"You older types are mired in the minds you grew up with, a real handicap in a rapidly changing universe. The future is a game for the young and the hungry—I’m five months old myself, and on the cutting edge."

"The history of any art is a history of man's states of mind and spirit, not of the objective world around him. To be ignorant of that is to be ignorant of the theater as an art, and leads to a mere muddle of resemblances and recognitions, a confusion between life and the theatre, contradictions about naturalness and artifice, and blindness to such ideas as require a new method or form to express them."

"“Altruism can be surprisingly gratifying,” it remarked. “No wonder humans dabble with it.”"

"Consider the as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything?"

"“People were killed,” Galvanix said wonderingly. “That doesn’t bother anyone,” said Rajee bluntly. “Among twelve billion, international relations are too important to be threatened by skirmishes.”"

"Stark Young was a man of protean interests in the arts. Because of this breadth of interest, it is arguable whether his main achievement was in fiction or in criticism, since he excelled in both, but after immersing myself in Young's critical writings in the theater, I have come to the conclusion that Young was the finest American critic on the art of the theatre of the first half of this century ..."

"Humans are deceitful, enthralled to the sexual strategies that drove their animal ancestors and drive them just as blindly. They jostle and kick for social supremacy and mating opportunities, fitfully aware of how this appears yet unable to transcend it. They injure their societies in the interest of those few with whom they share genes, and will injure them in pursuit of opportunities to breed further. They are suspicious, irrational, and destructive, eventually to all but most immediately to those unlike themselves."

"Where were you, last night?" "I was in bed... sleeping Beside you... Of course!" "And I was leaping Broomsticks, and burying Jesus, And patting Godiva's horse!"

"Science tends to frighten those who are infrequently exposed to it, while the practitioners of science are often the most misunderstood people in the world."

"It may be that science has rather gone to our heads. Science is all right in its place, but that is no reason for our treating life like something in a test tube. Social studies such as education, sociology and similar things, which surely more than anything but fiction must deal with human beings and all their complicated relationships, are haunted by the scientific method, reduced largely to graphs, statistics and a hodge-podge of pseudo-scientific terms, the human element neglected or lost. In a similar manner, equally affected perhaps, romance has to be reduced to the scientific or physiological level. The love songs we hear on the radio and see on television are accompanied by physical gymnastics."

"In ', talked about how she spent her childhood thinking that real life would start after the surgeries stopped."

"If all fairy tales begin "Once upon a time," then all graduation speeches begin "When I was sitting where you are now." We may not always say it, at least not in those exact words, but it's what graduation speakers are thinking. We look out at the sea of you and think, Isn't there some mistake? I should still be sitting there. I was that young fifteen minutes ago, I was that beautiful and lost."

"The years spent in the freelance trenches eventually paid off; I would go on to have some remarkable assignments. I've toured the great s of Italy, gone on a mock honeymoon in Hawaii, driven an across the , all on someone else's dime. Whenever people ask how they can get those same kinds of assignments, I recommend what worked for me: eight years writing freelance articles for ."

"Oxford alumna Alice Winn, who studied English Literature at , may have published just one novel so far, but it is one hell of a debut. Since its appearance in 2023, In Memoriam has met with widespread acclaim and been lauded with prizes – and with good cause. It’s a genuinely compulsive page-turner, a sweeping historical tragedy and an intimate love story all rolled into one, exactly the kind of book that plays on your mind for a long time afterwards. Following a forbidden love between two soldiers in the First World War, you can imagine the acute sense of heartache that runs throughout."

"I find it interesting that most of the was written by officers. The same is not true in France and Germany. I can’t imagine that British privates wrote less — I wonder if they were simply published less? The best piece of writing I read from the perspective of a British private was ’ ', but it is abstract and more beautiful than useful, from a research perspective."

"Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape."

"“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ ” My father said that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but, as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now."

"I'm always writing essays—eight hundred words on owning a for a newspaper in London, my ten favorite books of the year for a magazine in Australia, an introduction for a newly reissued classic, maybe a little piece about dogs. Essays never filled my days, but they reminded me that I was still a writer when I wasn't writing a novel."

"Usually, when you read war literature, they’re trying to present what they went through to someone who wasn’t there."

"In the UK world war one is a selling point; in the US it's more an obstacle. In the UK we live in the fossilised wreckage of world war one; a lot of people see it as a turning point for the empire and it looms larger in the consciousness."

"The Old Man just claimed that the stature of the man was measured by how much he could smile when fate was beating him over the head with a stick."

"There is a saying among the Masai of Africa—or maybe it's the Somali—that a brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh."

"[M]odern sucker civilization, in which, basically, most things that are not worth doing are done badly."

"We progress now by easy hysteria to plastics. I recently encountered а plastic fire shovel. As I attempted to remove some hot ashes from а fireplace which did draw—it was on a pre-Civil War Texas ranch—the fire shovel melted in my hands. The ranch had been newly refurnished, and the ashtrays were plastic, as well. I left a cigarette іп an ashtray—where else do you stick it, in your eаг?—and the ashtray melted and the cigarette set fire to the tablecloth. We will now dismiss plastics, because I'm beginning to quiver again."

"[T]he cold consommé was hot and half-melted, the liver came straight out of a synthetic-testing lab, and the whipped cream on the strawberry shortcake was purest Rise. The strawberries were made of genuine artificial coloring."

"In the food department, practically nothing remains constant except catsup."

"Only choice between the brand-spankers and the reconverts is to live in the suburbs, and that means trains. Oy vay. Trains. The trouble with train people is that they think they are still living in an early Harriman era. They think they are still in the railroad business."

"I have visited friends—reasonably affluent, and of dissimilar sexes—in what the real-estate racket calls "luxury housing," and have fled in horrified relief to a goathide tent in Timbuktu."

"Dinnertime, and the living is greasy."

"Bread is aerated sawdust, painted ghostly white. It owns all the nutriment of a breath of its principal ingredient, air."

"[T]hat commodity Ben Franklin trapped in a precursor to the Coca-Cola bottle."

"I bear scars on wrist and soul from being chewed by а leopard who would have been dead if my gun's ammunition had fulfilled its basic purpose. But we picked the buckshot out of the cat's hide like currants from a bun. I choked the leopard to death with the shotgun, which doesn't work anymore."

"Allegedly, electricity runs а variety of things, like vacuum cleaners that bust, television sets that explode, and lights that burn out. I admit its existence, but I don't really believe in it."

"I reckon the years between forty and sixty are the best a man's apt to put in. He can do dang near anything as good as he could when he was a youngster, and what he can't jump over he's smart enough to walk around."

"I acquired a castle in Spain. The rain in Spain falls mainly on my brain, because the roof is porous."

"Another dissatisfied mortal writes: "I am reminded of a TV set that a company wanted me to try, free of charge, for a couple of months; the case was made of extruded white plastic, ugly as a Tasmanian devil, with a plastic white clock stuck on it like a second eye.""

"Some of the conversations from next door, upstairs and downstairs would make an interesting addendum for the memoirs of Christine Keeler. You can hear beds squeak all round; you can hear toilets flush. On a clear day, you can hear a cockroach belch."

"Apple pie? Nuuh-uh. In my time it was a delight, and I went to war for it and motherhood. But motherhood is obsolete, too, in the old-fashioned sense, and now apple pie is a slag heap of green apples jammed between two layers of Bakelite. What, oh what, ever happened to the slim slices that came cinnamon-drenched from the crusted deep-dish?"

"At least if you can laugh instead of cry the troubles will either kill you or go away, and it is a bit better to die laughing than to die crying."

"If they keep exposing you to education, you might even realize some day that man becomes immortal only in what he writes on paper, or hacks into rock, or slabbers onto a canvas, or pulls out of a piano."

"The Old Man never held forth much on formal religion. He said he reckoned a man knew best what his own God was and how to work with Him, and he was never much of a reformer. He said he reckoned Somebody, no matter what name you called Him, was responsible for sun, moon, mountains, sea, stars, heat, cold, seasons, animals, birds, fish, and food—"even small boys, although that may have been a basic mistake"—and whether you called him God, Allah, Jehovah, or Mug-Mug didn't make much difference as long as you believed in Him."

"On the sexes: "Man is a simple creature a very small boy who wants to be patted on the head and told he's a good boy and a nice boy and a smart boy. You can lead him anywhere. But as for women, I don't know. They got a sort of contrary, different chemistry of brain and action from men, which makes them unruly and subject to strange ts. My only advice on women is to stay out of the house when they're cleaning and don't say yes too often.""

"Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer."