Quotes by Mona Simpson

About Mona Simpson:

Mona Elizabeth Simpson is an American author and university professor. She has written six novels and is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Maybe she’d always wished to be beautiful and didn’t quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn’t say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there’d been a mistake and she was afte...

Mona Simpson

These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

Mona Simpson

Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. "Am I still a mother?" I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.

Mona Simpson

Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

Mona Simpson

But would I have chosen to be Paul? I'd miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.

Mona Simpson

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come c...

Mona Simpson

I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.

Mona Simpson

Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.

Mona Simpson

The more you learn about animals and animal rights - it's an intriguing, fascinating world.

Mona Simpson

I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'

Mona Simpson

I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.

Mona Simpson

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even ...

Mona Simpson

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

Mona Simpson

I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn't feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.

Mona Simpson

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly s...

Mona Simpson

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Mona Simpson

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.

Mona Simpson

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, ...

Mona Simpson

When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of her clients and his little sister while the parents went away on vacation. She brought me along.

Mona Simpson

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Mona Simpson

Author Bio

  • NameMona Simpson
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist
  • BornJune 14, 1957
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Essayist; Novelist
  • WorksAnywhere But Here
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship