Novelists From The United States

"Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday—tapped the feet of the mare."

"Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed."

"You could not give me toys in those bleak days; So when my playmates proudly boasted theirs, You caught me to the shelter of your arms, And taught me how to laugh away my tears."

"If there was anything "new and better" about America it was the hope of peace—of peace on a more secure, vaster, continental scale than had ever been tried or attempted before. Oceans to the east and west of her, arid wilderness to the south, and the self-same friendly people to the north—the nation could not be seriously threatened by anything but disturbance from within."

"This Appalachian country was not huge, barren, and monotonous like so much of the West. There was nothing here to suggest that perhaps one had always better be moving. On the contrary, there was a kind of overtone from the countryside that whispered, "Tarry, traveller, tarry. Here is comfort for the soul of man. Here are verdancy and peace.""

"What is even a wise book but a blast from the lungs made visible to the eyes?"

"In every life, whatever you do, you either destroy or create."

"He felt…good, which should’ve been a sign. If life taught Zig anything, it’s that the universe saves its best punches for when you least expect it."

"I hate watching cable news; it makes you dumber."

"I know why you’re here, Mr. Zigarowski. Your commitment to repetition makes it nauseatingly obvious."

"You say you’re a mortician? You should know better than anyone. Just because you’re not dead doesn’t mean you’re alive."

"“How old are you, Mr. Zigarowski? Late forties?” “Fifty-two.” “Mhmm. You got lucky with that head of hair. Lady Time picks her lovers with care.”"

"There are only four different magic tricks: You make something appear. You make something disappear. You make two things change place. Or you change one thing into something else. Everything in magic is a variation on those four."

"I studied mind-cure, or metaphysical healing, which strikes at the root of disease; I went into hypnotism, mesmerism, and phrenomagnetism, and the od force—I don't suppose you know about the od which Reichenbach discovered."

"Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure."

"Journalism is organized gossip."

"Shrews are tamed only by silence."

"Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium."

"The people liked the prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives. Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world, ... unless it had been a first-class circus."

"Jesus was the first great teacher of men who showed a genuine sympathy for childhood,—perhaps the only teacher of antiquity who cared for childhood as such. Plato treats of children and their games, but he treats them from the stand-point of a publicist. They are elements not to be left out in constructing society. Children, in Plato's eyes, are not to be neglected, because children will inevitably come to be men and women. But Jesus was the first who loved childhood for the sake of childhood. In the earlier stages of civilisation it is the main endeavour of men to get away from childhood. It represents immaturity of body and mind, ignorance and folly. The ancients esteemed it their first duty to put away childish things. It was Jesus who, seeking to bring about a new and higher development of character, perceived that there were elements in childhood to be preserved in the highest manhood; that a man must, indeed, set back again toward the innocence and simplicity of childhood if he would be truly a man. Until Jesus Christ, the world had no place for childhood in its thoughts. When He said, "Of such is the kingdom of Heaven," it was a revelation."

"Novels are more like a marriage, stories more like affairs. A novel is something you live with for years and the characters in it become your second world, your second life. You think about them when you are not with them. You consider breaking up with them. You love them, you hate them. You fear them and avoid them and then run toward them and have a hard time extricating yourself from them. It’s such a whole body and mind experience that when it’s over and you are finally done, you experience real grief. Relief too, but also grief and a kind of identity crisis. You don’t know who you are without these characters to return to and wrestle with."

"I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous."

"With my first novel, when I was having such a hard time letting it go, I remember my brother saying to me, “It’s just a record of your creative mindset in a particular moment. You can’t drag it into the next moment. Let it be a record.” That was very helpful to me in terms of letting go – understanding there is no perfect version of the novel, there is only a time and place you wrote it as well as you could, reflecting your preoccupations, and then you move on."

"My mother had this book lying around our house in the 1980s called “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” I remember looking through it as a kid and understanding that Jewish people had their own inside jokes, and this fact alone somehow made me feel that Jewish people were their own club, a tribe, with an inside and an outside."

"...To grapple with race is not at odds or separate from the craft of writing fiction."

"Writing is so hard. It’s terrifying. And yet, when it goes well, it’s magical – better than any drug. You write for that fleeting moment when you get to see your Frankenstein creation come to life."

"Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the mulatto is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes."

"Christ's example is opposed, not to temperance, but to asceticism. Even the example of Jesus Christ must be followed in the light of common sense. What He might do in one age or nation we may find perilous in a different state of society. It is our bounden duty to abstain from that which causeth our brother to offend, whether it be meat or wine. But let us always distrust those who twist the plain language of Scripture in an endeavour to prove that what Christ drank was not wine."

"I use the word mulatto a lot in my work, and I have sort of rejected the more politically correct term of "biracial" or "multiracial," mainly because it's meaningless and vague, and it could describe any two or three mixes that one could be. But mulatto — as problematic as the word is, and it comes out of slavery and the sort of pseudoscientific ideas of race, as problematic as it is — it's the only word that really describes this very specific experience of being Black and white and being that mixture in America, which is, singular, and I think an important distinction from the other mixes."

"I wrote a pilot for a show that was based on my work. I wrote an original pilot for a limited series that is still out there being shopped around. … What I felt writing scripts is, I really like it. It's very interesting and sort of technical-feeling compared to writing novels. And I will continue to do it because it's a nice break between books, and it kind of can pay … to get a new stove in your kitchen, like there's actual financial benefits to doing it. But I think my soul is in the page and in writing novels. Being in control of the entire universe that I'm writing is really what feeds me on a much deeper level. And so I will never kind of fully abandon the written word. It just feeds me in a whole other way, but unfortunately doesn't literally feed me or my children."

"I probably shouldn’t admit this, but writing for me sometimes begins in a spirit of revenge. I looked it up recently: the word revenge comes from the Anglo-French revengier, sharing lineage with vengeance, which originates from the Latin vindicāre, meaning “to assert a claim, claim as one’s own.” I write to lay claim. To claim the world as my own... Sometimes the spirit of revenge comes from a more personal, petty place. I want to tell how someone wronged me. But what I love about fiction is that nothing ends where it begins. In the writing, I am forced to identify with the person who wronged me and to look critically on the protagonist who was wronged. Through endless drafts, I’ve drifted so far away from the original story—so far from the spirit of revenge—that I find myself in a more tangled and interesting new place. So the real act of revenge is that I was able to make art out of the ashes of real pain. I’ve never been convinced that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But if you know how to make fiction out of lived experience—how to turn the “me” into a “she,” how to find the story that didn’t happen within the one that did—you don’t walk away from the calamity empty-handed. In a spin on the old Zen saying, the obstacle is not just the path but the muse itself. Or, in Nora Ephron’s words, “everything is copy.”"

"For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity. It wasn’t the white side of us."

"I think it’s always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came before."

"I think all serious artists at some point waver in their self-belief. But you also have to have those moments when you are deluded enough to believe that some crazy thing will work out. Even if it means returning to what you intended to do to begin with."

"People who are always lamenting their lack of feeling are, for the most part, those who crave some vague sense of the turpitude of human wrong-doing in general. But John was the most personal of preachers. He pointed out the specific sins of his hearers. He listened to specific confessions. He gave specific exhortations. Repentance of a general sort is not worth the while. If you will regret your sins, drag out your own particular wrong-doing and look at it. Do not weep over Adam's fall, nor repent of the general depravity of man, but turn with loathing and regret from that which defiles your own life. If you are stingy, or greedy, or envious, or lustful, or smally selfish, or ill-tempered, or censorious, or lazy, remember that one tear over your specific sin is better than a thousand shed from a vague sense of general unworthiness."

"Even when you’re ready for it, nothing sneaks up on you like grief."

"“You’re telling me you can hack into an FBI agent’s phone?” “Only when they’re dumb enough to use their personal one instead of a secure line. Swear to Steve Jobs, whoever invented working from home should get a big wet kiss on the mouth.”"

"302 phone number. Delaware. Truthfully, I didn’t think they allowed anyone to live in Delaware anymore."

"Sure enough, as Colonel Hsu stepped into his office, she gave him a big thumbs-up with a double pump. She was a politician. If she was leading with charm, bad news was coming."

"As Huck’s about to learn, the worst prisons are the ones we create for ourselves."

"She thought about praying, but learned long ago there’d be no answer."

"Years ago, his stepdad had told him that anyone who drives a BMW has a small penis."

"“I love that you’re one of the kindest people on the planet, Ziggy, but I’ve seen teenagers in horror movies who’re less predictable…car washes that were less predictable…” “I get the point, Waggs.” “Ferris wheels that were less predictable!”"

"Years ago, during her first visit, Nola came here to do good, to set things right. But like any decision you look back on through the lens of time, what you marvel at most is how naïve you were."

"The Valium washed over him like a lullaby."

"Kane felt like a Goth at the sack of Rome, watching his stream of piss wash the delicate paints from a piece of Grecian marble."

"The sun had creased his face like a note that had been folded and refolded and kept in a dirty pocket."

"I've got nothing against corporatocracy myself, but nationalism doesn't die out overnight. We've seen that here, and we don't want it starting again."

"We outnumber the rich and always will. This is still a democracy, more or less, and we have the ability to vote with our brains and not some kind of mixed up idealism that makes us go against our own interest. And we can organize, so that when the rich and privileged don’t keep their promises, we have a way to make them listen."

"I weep those dead lips, white and dry, On which no kisses lie, Those eyes deserted of desire, And love’s soft fire. I weep the folded feet and hands, Held fast in linen bands; Still heart, cold breasts—for them my dole: God hath the soul."