Novelists From The United States

"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life. This is the truth which I have learned from the teachings of the Nazarene."

"Let us disperse from our aloofness and serve the weak who made us strong, and cleanse the country in which we live. Let us teach this miserable nation to smile and rejoice with heaven's bounty and glory of life and freedom."

"(Henry Clarendon IV:) "Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?""

"You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off."

"I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them."

"The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little."

"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off."

"When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed."

"“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”"

"She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."

"The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with."

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

"Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings."

"Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that."

"There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel."

"The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to."

"Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

"'He used to wear a little blond moustache but Mother made him cut it off. She said -' 'Don't tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.'"

"I hung up. It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk."

"'The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.'"

"The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens."

"When I left, Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie-crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homely smile on her face to watch me drive away. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again."

"'Okay, thees Hench no good, but poor guy, drunk, no job. Pay no rent, but I got lotsa money. So I say, Look, Hench, you make the confess. You sick man. Two three weeks sick. You go into court. I have a lawyer for you. You say to hell with the confess. I was drunk. The damn coppers are stuck. The judge he turn you loose and you come back to me and I take care of you. Okay? So Hench say okay, make the confess. That's all.' I said: 'And after two or three weeks the bad brother is a long way from here and the trail is cold and the cops will likely just write the Phillips killing off as unsolved. Is that it?' 'Si.' He smiled again. A brilliant warm smile, like the kiss of death."

"A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins."

"He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in."

"She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones."

"I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing."

"The guy keeps writing about Jesus, but he doesn't consider himself a Christian … He says faith is necessary but that we should accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything."

"Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, despite its incoherencies, is a lovely, enduring book."

"("How much do you have to know about science to write science fiction?") It is good to know something about at least one field, so that you know how scientists think and how science is done, if you're going to have a any science or even any pseudo-science in your stories. But there is a requirement: that a science fiction writer be interested in science. He may hate it; I think Ray Bradbury hates it. I know he hates technology, and I rather think he hates science. But he's interested in it. It's got down into his subconscious and it comes up in the form of horrors and monsters. But he takes it seriously."

"I think Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language."

"Ray Bradbury...writes with such breathless enthusiasm and from an obvious appreciation of beauty."

"I spent one entire summer reading Ray Bradbury...I remained in Ray Bradbury's world for as long as possible. It was a place where it was possible to recognize good from evil, darkness from light. I was a cynical kid, and I didn't have much faith in the world, but I trusted Ray Bradbury. I took everything he said personally. (p 33)"

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...for me, the greatest discovery of my childhood reading life: Ray Bradbury...Ray became my literary father. He was the one who taught me about the world, and he was a great teacher. I think every 12-year-old should read him (and every adult as well, but 12-year-olds are so much better readers). “Fahrenheit 451” is an American classic and a work of genius, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” is my favorite of his books, small-town magic. I loved them all and still do. I admired Ray as a writer and a person and wish he was still here with us."

"In the science fiction genre, I am a fan of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov."

"Ray Bradbury was never one of my favorite authors: He’s a little soft, kind of romantic, and, worst of all, moralizing. But The Martian Chronicles is a great book."

"He was kind, and gentle, with that midwestern niceness that’s a positive thing rather than an absence of character."

"I knew Ray Bradbury off and on since 1980 when, as a student at the American Film Institute Center, I was asked if I could pick him up and bring him to school for his seminar. You see, Ray never learned how to drive. But he knew very well how to give encouragement and enthusiasm to anyone."

"Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction … Probably no other writer in this book could I get away with introducing in that way. But who in the civilized, book-reading world doesn't know the name Ray Bradbury? When the time came to write a few words to preface Ray, I suddenly was struck with the impossibility of the act. There have been whole treatises written on Bradbury, his poetic images, his humanity, his blue period, his chrome period … who the hell was I to write about him? Well, I'm a Bradbury fan, and that's not bad for openers. … Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest promotion of him as the first sf writer to escape the ghetto and win approbation from such as Isherwood, Wilder, Fadiman, Algren, Gilbert Highet, Graham Greene, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffault and Bertrand Russell, for God's sake! Let's face it, fellow sf readers, we've been living off Ray Bradbury's success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the works of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance? I mean, there's a Viking Portable Library edition of RAY BRADBURY. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov are well-known and much-beloved, but if you go out on the street and buttonhole the average shmendrik, and ask him to name a dozen famous American writers, if he isn't a dullard who'd name Erich Segal and Leon Uris and Jacqueline Whatshername, he'll rattle off Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mickey Spillane, maybe Faulkner, and very probably Bradbury. That's a load of ego-boost for all of us, and it's about time someone said it. When we do the conversion bit with scoffers, we whirl them over to the meager sf racks in most bookstores and we may find no Delany, no Lafferty, no Knight or Disch or Dickson, but by God we always find The Martian Chronicles. And we say, "Here try this. You'll love it." … I mean come on, all you smartass literary cynics who make points off other men's careers, can you ever really forget that thing that called to the foghorn from the sea? … I'll just tag out by saying Ray Bradbury is a man who has written some 300 stories …wrote the screenplay for John Huston's production of Moby Dick… wrote a "space age cantata" dealing with the possible images of Christ on other worlds, Christus Apollo, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and he is a very good, kind, committed man who was in no small part responsible for getting LBJ booted out of office. And he's the only man whose poetry I would have included in this, a book of stories. Well, maybe Robert Graves …"

"Bradbury has been called a Unitarian, but he rejects that term. He dislikes labels of any kind. "I'm a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself," he says. "I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down." … Allusions to Christianity are common in his stories, but Bradbury doesn't define himself as a Christian. He considers Jesus a wise prophet, like Buddha and Confucius… "Jesus is a remarkable person … He was on his way to becoming Christ, and he made it.""

"He describes himself as a "delicatessen religionist." He's inspired by Eastern and Western religions. The center of his faith, though, is love. Everything — the reason he decided to write his first short story at 12; his 56-year marriage to his muse and late wife, Maggie; his friendships with everyone from Walt Disney to Alfred Hitchcock — is based on love. Bradbury is in love with love."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

"The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance. It’s like my friend Mr. Electrico. … he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. … Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back. Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him. When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped. Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to."

"Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy."

"In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other."

"Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too."

"I don’t understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them."

"Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is “at play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been fortunate. Very fortunate."

"I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you."