Wally Lamb Quotes - Page 2

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

I grew up in a household of women, they ran the show, they kept it all together. I credit my ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

I won't read novels while writing novels.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

I'm a very rooted person. I grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, I still live in Connecticut.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

With destruction comes renovation.

Connecticut is in my blood.

I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better; what should I cut out to make it stronger; what do I need to do to clarify it; and finally, what should I reposition.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.