Dev > Dev's Quotes

“That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.”
― Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.”
― Scott B. Smith, A Simple Plan

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“Artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.”
― Craig Johnson, The Cold Dish

“When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.”
― Scott B. Smith, A Simple Plan

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“That's the real excellent scary part, that feeling, and that feeling won't come if the lady from next door is there and your mom won't ride the ride, because what brings on that feeling most is when your mom rides wedged in tight with you and your brother on nights like this, when your mom will scream the excellent scream, the scream that people you see in snatches on the boardwalk stop and stare for, the scream that stops the ride next door, the scream that tells us to our hearts the bolts have finally broken.”
― Mark Richard, The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories

“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
― Harry Crews

“If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”
― Harry Crews

“You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.”
― Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts

“That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Though this knave came something saucily into this world before he was sent for, yet was is mother Fair; there was good sport at his making, and the Whoreson must be acknowledged.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.”
― Edith Grossman, Don Quixote

“The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you’re walking out of the theater you can’t remember anything at all about your own life.”
― Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat

“I typed "royal family" into a dream-interpretation website, but they didn't have that in their database, so then I typed "butt" and hit "interpret," and this came back: To see your buttocks in your dream represents your instincts and urges. It also said: To dream that your buttocks are misshapen suggests undeveloped or wounded aspects of your psyche. But my butt was shaped all right, so that let me know my psyche was developed, and the first part told me to trust my instincts, to trust my butt, the butt that trusted him.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Spiders are not insects, but in a war they will side with the insects.”
― Bill Bailey

“Boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls.”
― Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art