Arthur Phillips Quotes

Every secret is a wrinkle.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Charm, amuse, inspire, tempt, overwhelm, dazzle. Will you earn reward? (195)

When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.

...[he] understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.

He had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she made appear at its strongest), then he would be a fool to leave a singer who so obviously was going to go all the way.

But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements - alimony and acrimony - the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip's tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.

The memoir industry is, what's the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.

She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds.

He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.

Are you still awake?' he might ask in the intimate whisper of 3 a.m. lovers who half arise, warm and happy, to find they have been in someone's company during all those lost hours of sleep.

To feel at home. To be at peace. To know one's desires are truly one's own and not inadvertently, unavoidably, just the desires of one's forebears long dead or, worse - worst of all - the manipulations of faceless Habit, Style, Tradition, History. To go somewhere because it would be warmer, to live and just to be. With the right person for the right reason, like this very moment, so that even this place, this historyless little grocery could glow with the importance of the past, right now, tonight.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.

All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.

I do worry that it's impossible to write something original, that there's nothing that a human hasn't already thought of. But I can put it out of my mind and get on with what I'm doing.

All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.-The Tragedy of Arthur

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

If I were a better version of me, I would not react faster than I think, would not be wounded when no harm was intended, would understand before too much time had passed to forgive ...

...the intranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions.