Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just lik...
At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn'...
It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an ...
I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes...
Well I think everything up to this point that I've been exposed to in my life has had an influence on me in some way, shape, or form even if I'm not conscious of it. So I definitely think that my studies in wu-shu, kung-fu, karate, kenpo, taikwando, ...
The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and wh...
There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is c...
The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing - big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astron...
I've always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in...
I think this is one bad side of a mirror; it helps us to see the reflection of the effects of our own actions on ourselves. We smile and it smiles back to us, we frown and it frowns to us. How I wish it shows us the reflections of the effects of our ...
You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if they know it they just don't acknowledge it. It's not something they really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don't think ...
It was never a conscious decision - I was introducing myself as Duffy and my friends were calling me Duffy, so I just knocked off the first half of my name. For me it's no big deal, but a lot of people want to unearth why I've called myself this. It'...
The early Stones were adolescent rockers. They were self-conscious in an obvious and unpretentious way. And they were committed to a musical style that needed no justification because it came so naturally to them. As they grew musically the mere repe...
I'm always conscious when I'm writing a story that the women in my books need to save themselves. They don't need to be scooped up into a man's arms and carried off into the sunset. But I also can't stand when writers feature a really strong female c...
The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left han...
Heaven help us! The girls have only to turn the tables,and say of one of their own sex,'She is as vain as a man,' and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilets, quite as pr...
Many of us can't go home again, whether home is Seville, Cabo Sur, Nastas, Havana, or Kansas City. Thus, we must recognize that home really lies in the eternal peace, dormant or conscious, that dwells in each human heart... Quote from "Ms. Quixote Go...
When I go from a role with heavy prosthetic makeup, which I've done quite a bit of as well, and then do a role where I'm not wearing any, I have to be conscious of toning everything down. Because when you're wearing prosthetic makeup, of course, you ...
Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish a...
It was her, something about her- whenever she did something that felt like a raw invitation, he simply went mad in his effort to take up the gauntlet.
Slight persistent effort can move you successfully forward in anything you do.
