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

I'm a simple cook, and there's a lot I don't eat. But food is important. It translates so easily into pleasure.

Mona Simpson

I do have food in my books. Different people eat different ways.

Mona Simpson

I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn't have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods - everything came from...

Mona Simpson

If a mother is sitting in a chair at the office, someone needs to be at home with her child. In some cases, that is a father. Much of the time, the material manifestation of the conflict is a nanny.

Mona Simpson

We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.

Mona Simpson

I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

Mona Simpson

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in 'Gourmet.' It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course - everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did.

Mona Simpson

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round t...

Mona Simpson

Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world.

Mona Simpson

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

Mona Simpson

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man, and he was my brother.

Mona Simpson

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Mona Simpson

I suppose 'My Hollywood' is only as politically meaningful as it is deeply inside the least powerful of its characters. I wanted it to reveal scenes of subtle exploitation, odd instances of accidental power and challenges to decency specific to its t...

Mona Simpson

I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.

Mona Simpson

I eventually made the reunion with my father that I'd used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we'd both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer n...

Mona Simpson

'Casebook' is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

Mona Simpson

We have all these cultural assumptions about love. People get hurt, and we say, 'Oh, it's no one's fault.'

Mona Simpson

It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.

Mona Simpson

The transparency men have enjoyed for generations, about their ability to frankly work while also reveling in fatherhood, is still complicated for women. Which is not to say that anyone can have everything.

Mona Simpson

We're all looking for an authentic way to be engaged in the community, engaged in politics, engaged in national discussion - and so, we're clunky. We're all clunky. But it's better than not doing it.

Mona Simpson

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

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