Rosellen Brown Quotes

One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self.

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.

It's a job. It's not a hobby. You don't write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it's just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you're going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.

If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. It's a delicious treat, studded with wise and beautifully observed detail, that places side by side those perpetually fascinating antagonists, the eager, casual American and the meticulous, pleasure-driven French. Christine Sneed knows everyone's intimate secrets and her book is lively, amusing, and, ultimately, kind to pretty much all of them.

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.

Like deathbed conversions, last paragraph soul-saving does not convince.