Novelists From The United States

"Our forefathers were pioneers. So are we."

"All poets and story-tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, re-assembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own."

"Certainly there are great men whose age circumscribes them so completely that we lose interest."

"It is very unlikely that we would drive to extinction any native Martian microorganisms in the process of extending the habitability of Mars."

"Musk can probably build a giant AI data centre on the Moon. But if it can’t compete with much cheaper alternatives on Earth, it could prove a financial disaster that collapses his credibility, and with it his entire corporate empire"

"By a peculiar logical inversion the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, its imitators, accomplices, and victims, have come to believe in a Negro problem....While there is actually no Negro problem, there is definitely a Caucasian problem.Continual reference to a Negro problem assumes that some profound difficulty has been or is being created for the human race by the so-called Negroes. This is typical ruling class arrogance, and...has no basis in fact It has been centuries since any Negro nation has menaced the rest of humanity. The last of the Moors withdrew from Europe in 1492.The so-called Negroes...have passed few if any Jim Crow laws...set up few white ghettoes, earned on no discriminatory practices against whites, and have not devoted centuries of propaganda to prove the superiority of blacks over whites....While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal. Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace, and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, exploited, persecuted, and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of white racial superiority.The term Negro itself is as fictitious as the theory of white racial superiority on which Anglo-Saxon civilization is based, but it is nevertheless one of the most effective smear devices developed since the Crusades...Of course "white" and "Caucasian” are equally barren of scientific meaning....There are actually no white people except albinos who are a very pale pink in color..."

"We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the Moon. We do not need such a station to go to Mars. We do not need it to go to near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. Nor can we accomplish anything in such a station that we cannot do in the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, except to expose human subjects to irradiation – a form of medical research for which a number of Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg"

"When an actor loses control of himself he loses control of his audience."

"Horace said: "He who would make others weep, must first have wept himself." Every motion picture director should have that on his wall."

"Free people make the only milieu possible in society for the full gift of one's self to church, state, and family. Free people enjoy and sustain and feel with one another because they live for one another. The paths of life are intermingled lives."

"A gang is the same as a wolf pack; gang members do not use their energies in friendship with one another, for they do not know what friendship is. If they are united, it is by the common bond of a desire to attack their world."

"We movie people should not be afraid of what people will say of our work. We should not allow a word or a theory to drive us into anything or away from anything without some strong inner reason. Most of all, we should not be afraid of popularity and of financial success. Success is like posterity brought within our immediate vicinity. To have pleased millions of people with comedy, pathos or a well-constructed story is to have done a glorious thing. You can call it art, merchandise, trash or wooden nutmegs, but you cannot rob it of its noble mission—to cast light into dark places."

"You can't use imitation silk before the motion picture camera. The lens is even quicker to detect imitation emotion."

"When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity."

"Of course they put communist propaganda in the movies! They paint a rich man as a fiend. They make every rich man in a play look like a fat boy in a museum, and every poor boy is made out as a skeleton. Actually, the only millionaires I've ever known were skinny dyspeptics—look at Rockefeller."

"Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."

"A man's motive in the small actions of daily life, like resting a moment on his pitchfork in the sun and listening intently, may be the most important thing about that man."

"The literary world does quite like the notion of genius, but it has no place for a Picasso."

"... was taught at the age of three. ... he had an extremely challenging early education. What would happen if you had a single mother who tried out the ? ... What if the mother would use ' to provide s for her fatherless boy?"

"DeWitt has an insatiable mind and deep pockets of knowledge in disparate subjects; she went on tangents about strategies, the quirks of and her obsession with the , who inspired one of her many unfinished novels. She speaks French and German, can read Greek and Latin, and understands close to a dozen other languages with varying degrees of proficiency — among them Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese."

"I thought if I could talk to editors, if I could talk to s, if I could show them the kinds of things you could do if you were making use of the page rather than just using words, then people would understand there has to be a way of approaching a book more like a film. With film, yes, you start out with a , but the director is given resources with which to realize that film. And everybody understands you can’t know from the beginning what that film is going to be in the end. You are not expected to submit an already completed film in order to get funding. But that is the way publishing works. It’s constrained by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word. You hand in your text, and then it’s handed over to the designer, but you have no contact with that person. The is theirs, the s are theirs; they just do whatever they want, and you have no discussion with them about how the presentation actually relates to what the text is about."

"As it turns out, the is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the . While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships. The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing."

"Forever occupied and diverted by its factions and its politicians, in their local intrigues for the acquisition of political power, the Ship of State sailed proudly on, too blinded by her preoccupation and too reliant in her strength to bestow a thought upon the perils of the sea. She sighted afar the foam of the maelstrom, and tossed her haughty pennants in sovereign disdain of its power. But its current was around her, and she glided unconsciously to her doom. In vain the exercise of her giant strength; in vain that her factions, in happy forgetfulness of their petty antipathies, united their powers to save! Too late! She was hurled, helpless and struggling, to ruin and annihilation; and as she sank, engulfed, she carried with her the prestige of a race; for in America the representatives of the one race of man, which, in its relation to the family of men, had borne upon its crest the emblem of sovereign power since the dawn of history, saw now the ancestral diadem plucked from its proud repose, to shed its lustre upon an alien crown. Thus passed away the glory of the Union of States, at the dawn of the Twentieth Century."

"I want to believe that it is sometimes our greatest and most difficult pain that leads us to our lives' purpose."

"Don’t try to impose your will on a book before you know what it is—or what it needs. Writing is a kind of trust exercise: you do the work, you show up again and again, and over time the story begins to meet you. It’s like standing at the edge of a clearing, palm open, trying to lure a wild animal out of the woods. Little by little, it creeps closer. And listen to your obsessions. Whatever you can’t stop thinking about—that’s your compass."

"... '. At the end of his , Hemingway writes of , “I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.” That line, and his portrayal of their marriage in his memoir—so poignant and steeped in regret—inspired me to first to read biographies of her, and then to write a novel, ', which tells the whole of their wildly romantic and ultimately tragic love story from her point of view. All the biographers agree that of Hemingway’s four wives and numerous conquests, Hadley’s the one who is changed for the better by knowing him. She blooms. When the two meet in 1920, Hadley’s a quiet, twenty-eight-year-old near-spinster. Her life has been difficult, strained by illness and death, and she’s all but given up on love and happiness. Ernest bowls her over with his aliveness and intensity. Though she can’t help but be anxious about his attractiveness to others, she takes the risk."

"“You intend to pray for answers to those questions, my lord?” “That, yes. But I have found that the best way to ask God about questions like these is to go out and dig up the data yourself.”"

"Amidst all the hubbub, wine and beer crossed the bar in one direction, while copper and silver crossed it in the other, making everyone happy on both sides."

"It had been one of those warm late spring days when no air moves and nothing else wants to. Not oppressively hot—just warm enough to enervate and to cause attacks of acute vernal inertia."

"The plans of men do not necessarily coincide with those of the Universe."

"Any group which makes a claim to infallibility must be very careful not to make any mistakes, and the mistakes that will inevitably occur must be kept secret or explained away—by lies, subterfuges and distortions. And that will eventually cause the collapse of the entire edifice."

"Master Sean O’Lochlainn had always been partial to mules. “The mule,” he was fond of saying, “is as much smarter than a horse as a raven is smarter than a falcon. Neither a raven nor a mule will go charging into combat just because some human tells him to.”"

"I have always contended that the true connoisseur is to be pitied, for he has trained his taste to such perfection that he enjoys almost nothing."

"In general he doesn’t know any more about magic than an ostrich knows about icebergs."

"All that was necessary was to use one’s imagination to see how it might have happened, and then check the evidence to see if it did happen that way. The final step is to check the evidence to make sure it could not have happened any other way."

"Are you an accessory to this imbecilic tomfoolery?"

"I had been ready to die. In the only way I could reckon it, less than two days ago I had come to terms with the fact that I would be dead within a year. To face such a truth, to let it penetrate down to the core of your being, demands incredible effort and indescribable pain. No matter how much life you’ve had, you want more. There are things undone, words unsaid, potentials unexplored. You know you could have done more with your life, and you beg fate, or whatever god you believe in, to give you more time. You know in your heart that another entire lifetime would not be sufficient, yet you pray for just a few more years."

"One of the troubles with the world is that so few laymen take an interest in science."

"The “remembered” lives had always been exciting and ended in murder, execution, or dramatic suicide. Not one of them had been a potato farmer who died quietly in his bed after seventy years of monotonous hard work. I had heard the argument that only violent personalities survived intact, but I frankly saw more late-night television than actual memory in the “past lives” I heard retold."

"Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly depressing. The United States of America contained more sub-normal minds than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to explain the results of any election you were unhappy over."

"“I’m sure,” Malone said. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” “Oh,” Blake said. After a second he added: “What does that mean?” Malone shrugged. “It’s an old saying,” he told the doctor. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It just sounds good.” “Oh,” Blake said again."

"I’m not a hard man to convince. And when I see the truth, I’m the first one to admit it, even if it makes me look like a nut."

"Miss Thompson may be off her trolley, but the others haven’t even got any tracks."

"There were people, Malone had always understood, who bounced out of their beds and greeted each new day with a smile. It didn’t sound possible, but then again there were some pretty strange people."

"Boyd looked up. “Rome,” he said in an absent fashion, “wasn’t built in a daze.”"

"No, I had kept an open mind about reincarnation—in spite of those people, not because of them."

"Philosophically, Nirvana and the Final Blackout were equally unappealing to me. Reincarnation—well, it seemed like wishful thinking to me. The defining factor for my entire attitude toward an afterlife of any kind was the total absence of objective evidence."

"To crave power is to be ruled by madness."

"One of the things that had led me to be skeptical about reincarnation had been a uniform quality of silliness in the Westerners I had met who professed to “remember” past lives. The Hindu or the Buddhist of eastern Asia bears his belief with dignity. It is part of a religion. To so many Westerners, it was a topic for discussion at cocktail parties."

"What does it matter? I asked myself. If you’re writing a fairy tale, don’t quibble over talking bears."