T.C. Boyle famous quotes

03-24-2025

First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Dream #Heart #Smell
Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Pain #Pleasure #Mates
There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Kindness #May #Would Be
I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what Iâ€™m going to say, or where itâ€™s going. I have some idea of how long itâ€™s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. Thatâ€™s the intrigue of doing it -- itâ€™s a process of discovery. You get to discover what youâ€™re going to say and what itâ€™s going to mean.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Mean #Discovery #Ideas
We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?
-- T.C. Boyle

#Book #Knowing #Space
A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes-not elsewhere-I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Believe #Home #Simple
A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Mind #Looks #Culture
I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?
-- T.C. Boyle

#Drinking #Believe #Dark
In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life." (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)
-- T.C. Boyle

#Football #Cheer #Believe
The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Writing
But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Writing #Journey #Feelings
At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Prayer #Hands #Joy
Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Latin #Names #Connections
To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.
-- T.C. Boyle

#Men #Enemy #Earth

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