Interview Quotes

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
― Douglas Adams

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, then it's not the end.”
― Ed Sheeran

“I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.”
― Johnny Depp

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”
― Paulo Coelho

“I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”
― Kurt Cobain

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Harry and Hermione are very platonic friends. But I won't answer for anyone else, nudge-nudge wink-wink!”
― J. K. Rowling

“Just think how many books I could've sold if Harry had been a bit more creative with his wand." -[On the success of 50 Shades of Grey]”
― J.K. Rowling

“I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”
― Haruki Murakami

“I'm a little bit naked, but that's okay.”
― Lady Gaga

“You have a very open relationship with your fans."

"Yes. We have an open relationship. Obviously they can see other authors if they want, and I can see other readers.”
― Neil Gaiman

“It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Your hair is still wet!”
― Justin Bieber

“Reader: Dear Mr. Snicket, What is the best way to keep a secret? Lemony Snicket : Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.”
― Banksy

“I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so I'm on my way home.”
― Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home: A Martin Scorsese Picture

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.”
― Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

“But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. ”
― Dave Eggers

“I don't believe there is any such definition, there is no such thing as evil, only moral judgments based on what society believes to be wrong behavior.”
― Nikolas Schreck

“I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.”
― J.K. Rowling

“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is that it’s a relationship that’s central to our identity in that it doesn’t necessarily benefit us in any tangible way. It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue – if we decide to stop being friends one day, nothing will happen, no one’s there to legislate or adjudicate it. It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”
― Hanya Yanagihara

“The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Zombies are the middle children of the otherworldly family. Vampires are the oldest brother who gets to have a room in the attic, all tripped out with a disco ball and shag carpet. Werewolves are the youngest, the babies, always getting pinched and told they're cute. With all that attention stolen away from the middle child Zombie, no wonder she shuffles off grumbling, "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.”
― Kevin James Breaux

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
― J.D. Salinger

“Liberals always say about totalitarians that they like humanity, as such, but they have no empathy for concrete people, no? OK, that fits me perfectly. Humanity? Yes, it's OK – some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, 99% are boring idiots.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.”
― Stanisław Lem

“Interviewer: You said I'm the first psychoanalyst you've met who had a sense of humor. Meaning you've met others who didn't?

Ezra: Proper little Sherlock over here, huh.”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae