Karen Bender Quotes
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
Quotes to Explore
-
'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
-
Let us democratise knowledge. Let us universalise justice. Together, let us globalise compassion!
-
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
-
All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
-
Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
-
We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
-
The excitement of the fans in Montreal, especially in the playoffs, I don't think you can get that anywhere else. For a hockey player, I kind of wish everyone could go through that and experience what it is to play there. It's very unique.
-
You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
-
Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
-
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
-
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
-
There's no story that breaks, including a five-alarm fire in Brooklyn, that I don't wish I were covering.
-
I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.
-
I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary.
-
I wish I didn't have to perform 'Iron Man' every night.
-
Some people seem to see compassion as being mushy.
-
My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility.
-
I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
-
You request my presence at the Olympic Games, and for that reason you have sent envoys. For myself, I would come for the spectacle of physical struggle, except that I would be abandoning the greater struggle for virtue.
-
In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.
-
House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.
-
My woman, the person who's buying the clothes, is from all walks in life. She's from different countries and cultures. She's going to be different sizes.
-
My best mentor is a mechanic - and he never left the sixth grade. By any competency measure, he doesn't have it. But the perspective he brings to me and my life is, bar none, the most helpful.
-
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
