Quotes by Wally Lamb

About Wally Lamb:

Wally Lamb is an American author known as the writer of the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both of which were selected for Oprah's Book Club. He was the director of the Writing Center at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich from 1989 to 1998 and has taught Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Connecticut.
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 started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had an...

Wally Lamb

The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled togethe...

Wally Lamb

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

Wally Lamb

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

Wally Lamb

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's...

Wally Lamb

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

Wally Lamb

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Wally Lamb

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

Wally Lamb

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.

Wally Lamb

-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Wally Lamb

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Wally Lamb

I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.

Wally Lamb

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feel...

Wally Lamb

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make g...

Wally Lamb

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Wally Lamb

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Wally Lamb

What if I don’t like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.

Wally Lamb

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

Wally Lamb

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

Wally Lamb

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Wally Lamb

Author Bio

  • NameWally Lamb
  • Descriptionnovelist
  • BornOctober 17, 1950
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist