Douglas Kennedy Quotes

We seemed to possess a similar worldview: slightly jaded, fiercely independent ...

Hate is a hard thing to sustain. Grief isn't. Grief is something that can stay with you for a very long time

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

At dawn, nothing seems certain ... yet everything appears possible.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

Once you've crossed over into that realm of nothingness, your story only really stays in the minds of those closest to you. And when they too vanish ...

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

Money. The trickiest substance in life
as it's the way we keep score, measure our worth, and think we can control our destinies. Money: the essential lie.

All lives are extraordinary. All lives are simultaneously banal and obvious.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to ... because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Biggest roadblocks you encounter in life are the ones you construct for yourself.

Most of us proceed with good intentions. We try our best. Yet so often we fail ourselves and others. What else can we do but try again? It's the only option open to us. Trying is the way we get through the day.

This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that's the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time does not elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a wee seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed - and its increasing preciousness as commodity.

We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do has import or will last. But the truth is, we're all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we're gone, it's simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they're gone ... That's why - when I go - I'm asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because ends up floating away.

Parisian arrogance meant that nobody was important, nobody counted.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

We can never change the story that made us what we are. It's a story accumulated by the manifold complexities-its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got; all that we got but never wanted; all that was found and lost.

Words matter, words have import.