Brian James > Brian's Quotes

“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”
― Jeanne DuPrau , The People of Sparks

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet

“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.”
― Richard Brautigan

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.”
― Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro

“One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white chargers and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home.”
― Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Some memories are presents that I'm unable to unwrap over and over.”
― Brian James, Life is But a Dream

“My memories are like a shuffled deck of cards, each one coming up at random.”
― Brian James, Life is But a Dream

“If you're from New Jersey,” Nathan had said, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it's highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. And so, long after you're gone, you may indeed be remembered, but mostly by small children, in the backs of cars, when they lean forward and tell their parents, 'Stop, please, stop at Zuckerman—I have to make a pee.' For a New Jersey novelist that's as much immortality as it's realistic to hope for.”
― Philip Roth, The Counterlife

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying, disappearing. Life is disappearing. So how can I feel spring, when spring is something that awakens life, and here there is no life, here everything seems to have died.”
― Zlata Filipović, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo