He: "Whale you be my valentine?" She: "Dolphinitely.
And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.
I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.
It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.
Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.
I find myself having rehearsal chats, in my head, for conversations I need to have. Sometimes they are arguments, things I need to get off my chest, award acceptance speeches. Ultimately, it clears my mind, helps me focus my thoughts, and sometimes alleviates the need for the real conversation.
To be a judge you don't have to know about books, you have to be skilled at picking shrapnel out of your head.
He tried to remember how this happened – how she went from someone he’d never met to the only one who mattered.
On many occasions in the late 1950s and 1960s, [Ho Chi Minh's] ideas were apparently ignored by those who felt that his approach was too naive and prone to compromise. The outbreak of open warfare with the French and later with the United States was in effect a sign of the failure of Ho Chi Minh to achieve his objective to fight and win at low cost.