Lists Quotes - Page 5

The day I notice a cyclist obey a stop sign is the day I'll stop enjoying watching them bounce off my hood.

We are mere journeymen, planting seeds for someone else to harvest.

If the Resurrection had not occurred, why would the apostle Paul give such a list of supposed eyewitnesses? He would immediately lose all credibility with his Corinthian readers by lying so blatantly.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, When once it is within thee; but before Mayst rule it, as thou list: and pour the shame, Which it would pour on thee, upon the floor. It is most just to throw that on the ground, Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.

Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

The checklist is one of the most high powered productivity tool ever discovered.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Success is never getting to the bottom of your to-do list.

Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg." Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

I am at best on the C list for Pope.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list.

I became a specialist at comedic one-liners.