A. B. Yehoshua Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
-
If a decision-making process is flawed and dysfunctional, decisions will go awry.
-
As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
-
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.
-
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
-
Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
-
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
-
People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
-
It takes me a long time to write, and I trust myself, so I write very sparsely, so when I do, I know it's good, you know what I mean? Rather than writing a whole bunch and having to sort out what's good and what's not.
-
There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.
-
I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.
-
A mistake that a lot of us have made, related to those who advocate for gun safety legislation, is that we try to process it through our legislative bodies, and that's where the NRA's strength lies.
-
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
-
The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.
-
I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down.
-
Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
-
From the very beginning, I always tried to make dialogue flow comfortably; I always did that to make it seem more authentic.
-
I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.
-
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
-
There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.
-
Only in your imagination can you revise.
-
The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.
-
The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
