I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a stor...
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and th...
But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.
I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subje...
Feathers!" spluttered Sargatanas. "Feathers are for the birds, my boy. Flaking, peeling, scale-ridden wings, now that's what real beings wear. I'll tell you a secret." He said, and drew me closer. "The eternal pain at having known Paradise and lost i...
Lou Reed is unimpressed by applause, and lives a life detached from custom. His stare is cold and his romanticism is brutal. His songs are half-sung melodies of menace. He might drop dead any second, and is therefore the real thing. Examined ravenous...
Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their...
Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It's a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, bala...
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day bu...
I want each of you to go through life making the most of your individuality. Like it or not, you will go out into the real world and be treated as an adult. Adults show each other no mercy. If you fail to cultivate within yourself a fight-back mental...
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own ...
There's no point in arguing and loving someone who doesn't want to be with you and doesn't want to keep you in his life.. the real person will try harder to reach out and work for the best and what's supposed to be done to their relationship.. but th...
All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote abou...
'Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew, a troubled kid, who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter fort...
I am so pathetic with machines in real life, it's not a joke. I'd rather walk, or even run, than take the car out myself. I like to be driven around. Yes, I like fancy cars, and fancy bikes, too. It's my dream to learn how to ride one myself, but for...
I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control ov...
We don't have real control over death. You could die of a heart attack, a building could fall on you, you could be in an accident, you could have a fatal disease. So, how should you conduct your life? You just go ahead and live, taking reasonable pre...
I know what a bozo I really am. And it's healthier for me to look at myself as a regular human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time. A star isn't a real thing, and it doesn't help to think of yourself as bigger than life. Yeah, I'm glad that...
My thing about going to the gym is that I leave my bracelets on, and I put on my makeup the way I would do it in real life, and I wear cute clothes, because if I don't feel good when I leave the house, then I'm not motivated to do it. I need to like ...
I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text...
Math just wasn't my favorite. I didn't get how important math is and how it relates to real life. That's why I think I was turned off to it. Once I got down arithmetic and a little bit of algebra, I think I checked out. As I've gotten older, I think ...
