Mona Simpson Quotes

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of her clients and his little sister while the parents went away on vacation. She brought me along.

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in 'Gourmet.' It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course - everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did.

Prologue: There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, "anywhere but here." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do have food in my books. Different people eat different ways.

Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man, and he was my brother.

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it improve upon the silence?

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'

We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.

I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps.

But would I have chosen to be Paul? I'd miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.

The transparency men have enjoyed for generations, about their ability to frankly work while also reveling in fatherhood, is still complicated for women. Which is not to say that anyone can have everything.

I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.

If a mother is sitting in a chair at the office, someone needs to be at home with her child. In some cases, that is a father. Much of the time, the material manifestation of the conflict is a nanny.

The more you learn about animals and animal rights - it's an intriguing, fascinating world.

These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.

Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. "Am I still a mother?" I asked myself ... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.

We have all these cultural assumptions about love. People get hurt, and we say, 'Oh, it's no one's fault.'

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.

I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

Maybe she'd always wished to be beautiful and didn't quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn't say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there'd been a mistake and she was after all.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.

The way Eli looked at her, my dad looked at the food.

And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, fair.

'Casebook' is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.