The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
J. M. G. Le Clezio
Related Millions of people acknowledge today that they do not know the meaning of life. JAMES C. DOBSON I love the idea of using film language similarly to how musicians use music - combining images and s... DAMIEN CHAZELLE Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the... STEVE CHANDLER But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer... CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS This is my fundamental teaching: that there is no division between this and that. That is contained ... OSHO Why do they rate a movie "R" for "adult language?" The only people I hear using that language are t... ELEANOR ROOSEVELT The enmity of such a party towards Socialism does not mean that the members are only prejudiced agai... KARL RADEK Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessl... LEO ROSTEN It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of langua... EDWARD SAPIR Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cann... G.K. CHESTERTON That's it really; it's all love, whichever way you look at it, it's all love. How much you can Get f... GEORGE HARRISON My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees o... RENE MAGRITTE How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. JACK GILBERT The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a langua... RICHARD RORTY My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees o... RENE MAGRITTE Behold they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, ... BIBLE Latinos are learning English. That doesn't mean that they should sacrifice their original langua... ILAN STAVANS We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these thin... JANE GOODALL I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long strea... SOL STEIN We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language. MAL PANCOAST Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes ... We cannot understand it... GALILEO GALILEI I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to us... FRANTZ FANON Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have. CAITLíN R. KIERNAN I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested i... BUDDY HOLLY To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again - gradually yo... AVI This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection ... MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and funct... ERIC HOFFER We all have supernatural powers, but do not know how to use them. That is why they are called SUPER-... SUZY KASSEM I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and w... NIKKI GIOVANNI I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or... DAVID OGILVY Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it’s up to the artist to use language that can be ... ROBERT A. HEINLEIN We are in discussion with them as to what that language really means. CARL FRANCIS The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, bec... JUAN GOYTISOLO Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to beh... MARK TWAIN Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don... CHRIS CRUTCHER In the narcissist's world being accepted or cared for (not to mention loved) is a foreign language. ... SAM VAKNIN 28. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's what you do with them that causes the problems. JAMES C. DOBSON The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and t... FLANNERY O'CONNOR We didn't have enough energy to create them in a lab. That means they are heavy particles, but we ca... HITOSHI MURAYAMA When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so conc... NIELS BOHR Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is... YUKIHIRO MATSUMOTO Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it s... PAUL DE MAN Some people are married to ideas that they do not love, ideas that do not love them in return. They ... JUSTIN K. MCFARLANE BEAU Students do not have many role models who use language well. They are very much into rap and movies ... MARILYN JACKSON Max is absolutely livid about this. The administration screwed up royally ... The Federal Highway Ad... BARRETT KAISER Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth tell... HUSTON SMITH I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary ... ADRIAN MITCHELL It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Whe... ROBERT G. INGERSOLL If we all look at life we think how nice, then we look at death and everybody goes oh you can say th... GARY F EVANS... Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the univer... GALILEO GALILEI This will mean that they cannot imagine life without consumer-electronics devices. ADI KISHORE Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mea... T.S. ELIOT If you love someone you must set them free like the wind and give them the respect they deserve.If y... GARY F EVANS... It does not surprise me that the FSB should invent such an insinuation. I have a very low opinion of... LUDMILA ALEXEYEVA Pastor Face Your Business” When people say this they mean that I must just stay behind the pulpit ... SUNDAY ADELAJA Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal... BARRY HUMPHRIES Flowers that are offered for the dead, do not know the difference of where their beauty will be plac... C. JOYBELL C. No one wants to see this happen. But the bottom line is they are going to have to say to us ?you are... JOE BURNS It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you ... DOROTHEA DIX Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstractio... JANE GOODALL As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption.... W. H. AUDEN For the philosopher, language, thought, and passion are the same. Ideas are personal to a philosophe... KILROY J. OLDSTER Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe —... GALILEO GALILEI I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown liter... ADRIAN MITCHELL That does make it look as if they are discriminating against the Spanish-language part, not the cont... ESTEVAN FLORES I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French l... TAHAR BEN JELLOUN The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the comm... ALBERT CAMUS Russian might not be their first language, but they learn it in school. It seems to be a common lang... ELAINE FISCHER Food Allergies Are Not Due to Food, Rather Are Due to the Constant Contamination of That Food That Y... THEHEALTHFOODGURU Being present is being connected to All Things. S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means... THOMAS S. SZASZ If they had them, and they were armed to the teeth with them, why didn't they use them? ... If they ... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change... JUNE JORDAN In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal... RABINDRANATH TAGORE It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most... ROBERT A. HEINLEIN Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time t... ALEX COX The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for k... CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w... JOAN DIDION We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It... COLSON WHITEHEAD It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the u... HANIF KUREISHI Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to hu... DANIEL EVERETT For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas com... E.L. KONIGSBURG This plan does not take away one's native language. It does not take away one's heritage or culture.... BOB STACK Your respect for people does not mean you need them This is your morality, even if they do not ... WACINY LAREDJ 'Station to Station' came out of a sense of urgency - a sense that culture, be it art, film ... DOUG AITKEN It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in ... BRIAN FRIEL It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied i... BRIAN FRIEL Convinced that we're living the whole time that we're dying. We decide to go out walking the wh... TEGAN QUIN They tell people that the language is sloppy and ask them not to risk a judge using those words to b... GLEN MAXEY By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function ... WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS We cannot expect people to take seriously our belief in objective truth if, in our practice, we indi... FRANCIS SCHAEFFER People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, ... RAOUL VANEIGEM Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't ... TS (THOMAS STEARNS) ELIOT Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don'... T. S. ELIOT Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't... T. S. ELIOT Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't ... T. S. ELIOT What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or he... HELEN KELLER The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things... JEAN-MARIE G. LE CLéZIO This doesn't mean the Conservatives have carte blanche. What it means is that the public is prepared... DARRELL BRICKER Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to u... NAOMI KLEIN
More J. M. G. Le Clezio
Reading is a free practice. I think the readers are free to begin by the books where they want to. T... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who ... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is aro... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religiou... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he us... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express t... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contac... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living wi... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, ... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and th... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to ret... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, bu... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before e... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear ... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginnin... J. M. G. LE CLEZIO Village cricket spread fast through the land. G. M. TREVELYAN If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would... G. M. TREVELYAN Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out. G. M. TREVELYAN The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with exc... G. M. TREVELYAN A little man often cast a long shadow. G. M. TREVELYAN Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea... G. M. TREVELYAN Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a di... G. M. TREVELYAN Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. G. M. TREVELYAN One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop. G. M. WEILACHER Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. G. M. TREVELYAN Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth readin... G. M. TREVELYAN Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you. G. M. TREVELYAN Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea... G. M. TREVELYAN Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for some... G. M. TREVELYAN One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop. G. M. WEILACHER Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on e... M. G. SIRIAM I have two doctors - my left leg and my right leg G. M. TREVELYAN One half who graduate from college never read another book. G. M. TREVELYAN The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history... G. M. TREVELYAN I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doc... J. G. STEDMAN Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence. J. G. STEDMAN During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it. J. G. STEDMAN I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everyt... J. G. BALLARD If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices... J. G. BALLARD To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I ... J. G. BALLARD Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in... J. G. BALLARD People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rai... J. G. BALLARD I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find... J. G. BALLARD In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom. J. G. BALLARD I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like ... J. G. BALLARD The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbani... J. G. BALLARD There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fa... J. G. BALLARD No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway... J. G. BALLARD Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spend... J. G. BALLARD The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and r... J. G. BALLARD I admired anyone who could unsettle people. J. G. BALLARD Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap a... J. G. BALLARD The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strang... J. G. BALLARD Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not nee... J. G. BALLARD Once in motion, a pattern tends to stay in motion. J. G. GALLIMORE Your self image is your pattern!. Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs t... J. G. GALLIMORE We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics cond... J. G. BALLARD I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer po... J. G. BALLARD Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprun... J. G. BALLARD Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica. J. G. BALLARD Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need ... J. G. BALLARD A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction. J. G. BALLARD He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lur... J. G. BALLARD People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of ... J. G. BALLARD Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort de... J. G. BALLARD In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom! J. G. BALLARD Image creates desire. You will what you imagine. J. G. GALLIMORE A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, ... J. G. BALLARD Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is l... J. G. BALLARD I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything... J. G. BALLARD Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th centur... J. G. BALLARD Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in whi... J. G. BALLARD The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall... J. G. BALLARD What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in c... J. G. BALLARD I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- ... J. G. BALLARD The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its... J. G. BALLARD Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of r... J. G. BALLARD The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever... J. G. BALLARD A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's stil... J. G. COZZENS God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest. J. G. HOLLAND I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenu... J. G. BALLARD I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned ... J. G. BALLARD Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in... J. G. BALLARD I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are large... J. G. BALLARD I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the b... J. G. BALLARD I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved t... J. G. BALLARD Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb... J. G. BALLARD In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at ... J. G. BALLARD At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to... J. G. BALLARD Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static bac... J. G. BALLARD The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its... J. G. BALLARD Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentatio... J. G. BALLARD My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian... J. G. BALLARD There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting. J. G. HOLLAND I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Cruso... J. G. BALLARD One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfort... J. G. BALLARD Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver. J. G. BALLARD A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satis... J. G. BALLARD When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baude... J. G. BALLARD A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the ... J. G. HOLLAND There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting. J. G. HOLLAND I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everythin... J. G. BALLARD Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent worl... J. G. BALLARD An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use. J. G. BALLARD I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-contr... J. G. BALLARD The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dyna... J. G. BALLARD I find it quite funny—no, hilarious—that despite my deep hatred for myself, if ever given the ch... J. "CYLO" G. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed t... J. G. BALLARD Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy... J. G. BALLARD I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a... J. G. BALLARD There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching ... J. G. BALLARD The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I k... J. G. BALLARD My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-d... J. G. BALLARD Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known th... J. G. BALLARD While reality and imagination is truth, everything and nothing is reality, for truth is merely imagi... J. "CYLO" G. I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of L... J. G. BALLARD I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - t... J. G. BALLARD Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. J. G. BALLARD The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall... J. G. BALLARD The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its... J. G. BALLARD The superiority complex of humans is astonishing. We always speak of other animals as if we were not... J. "CYLO" G. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set u... J. G. BALLARD The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early r... J. G. BALLARD Justice is merely vengeance in disguise. J. "CYLO" G. Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb... J. G. BALLARD Death is our savior from life. J. "CYLO" G. The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at larg... J. G. BALLARD I sometimes wonder if I am mad, but then I wonder what it means to be mad. I mean, can you truly say... J. "CYLO" G. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a va... J. G. BALLARD I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much... J. G. BALLARD My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I ... J. G. BALLARD There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a ... J. G. BALLARD The heart is wiser than the intellect. J. G. HOLLAND There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, and all things in succession. That which gr... J. G. HOLLAND E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the ... J. G. BALLARD I was terribly wounded by my wife's death. J. G. BALLARD Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrate... J. G. BALLARD Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and butt... J. M. ROBERTS There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the concl... J. M. ROBERTS The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough litera... J. M. ROBERTS Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if ... J. M. ROBERTS Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appear... J. M. ROBERTS There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called 'momie' that... M. J. ROSE Vera Caspary wrote thrillers - but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specia... M. J. ROSE Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard, or a bottle of wine f... M. J. ROSE Social media buzz can lead to huge successes when people spread the word about something they love a... M. J. ROSE PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores ... M. J. ROSE I'm realistic about my career as a novelist. I'm certainly not a superstar and far, far from... M. J. ROSE All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displ... M. J. ROSE An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript -... M. J. ROSE The one thing I am now sure of is that if there is such a thing as destiny, it is a result of our pa... M. J. ROSE The most satisfying thrillers send ordinary people into battle against the forces of evil - otherwis... M. J. ROSE It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking our careers will come to a standstill, or worse, cra... M. J. ROSE You shouldn't talk about yourself all the time - most of us aren't for sale. Our books are. ... M. J. ROSE We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and libra... M. J. ROSE Don't add people to your subscriber list just because they once wrote you a note. Or once answer... M. J. ROSE A curious mind is the most important attribute any man or woman can possess. M. J. ROSE I might have created the phrase 'memory tools', but people have always found talismans to he... M. J. ROSE I think that we need to live our lives for the present... as if it is our one and only wild and wond... M. J. ROSE I always miss my mom. Mother's Day would be just one more day I'd feel her absence but for t... M. J. ROSE Sales don't always have anything to do with good or brilliant or original. Sales are about appea... M. J. ROSE Ask your editor or ask your agent to find out what the house's goals are for your book before it... M. J. ROSE A mystery is a whodunit. You know what happened, but not how or who's behind it. A thriller, or ... M. J. ROSE As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made... J. M. SYNGE Before MS moved in on me, I'd worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a litera... M. J. HYLAND Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world,... J. M. COETZEE The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but see... J. M. SYNGE Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung an... J. M. SYNGE In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist... J. M. SYNGE I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen. J. M. SYNGE If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up. J. M. POWER I was taught to think outside the box. Before my grandfather was one of the original Mad Men, he and... M. J. ROSE I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who alloc... M. J. ROSE I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing an... M. J. ROSE There is no debate that social media is a great tool for networking with others in our industry. It ... M. J. ROSE Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I'd been born to morons,... M. J. HYLAND Buy other authors' books when you go to their events. Even if you aren't going to read it. E... M. J. ROSE In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, b... J. M. COETZEE I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read ev... M. J. ROSE As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calend... J. M. COETZEE God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December. J M BARRIE The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated ... J. M. COETZEE Back in 1999 and 2000, a few of us... a very few of us... Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin and I... offered... M. J. ROSE My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time tha... J. M. COETZEE The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, e... J. M. COETZEE In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple. J. M. SYNGE The biggest mistake is to assume that another writer's successful strategy will work for you, to... M. J. ROSE Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior,... M. J. ROSE I grew up in New York and have lived here all my life. I think it's the best city in the world a... M. J. ROSE When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in ... M. J. ROSE I've always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant peopl... M. J. ROSE In becoming a citizen, one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangibl... J. M. COETZEE I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. J. M. COETZEE Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards a... J. M. COETZEE The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness. J. M. COETZEE Find out if your radio interviewer has read your book, or you are going to have to do that part of t... M. J. ROSE It's been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, 'Lip Service', up on... M. J. ROSE MWA and The Author's Guild refused to accept me as a member. M. J. ROSE From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting publis... M. J. ROSE