Tamara Molko > Tamara's Quotes

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
― Irina Dunn

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”
― William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
― Robert Hass

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.”
― Robert Strauss

“If plan A doesn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters - 204 if you're in Japan.”
― Claire Cook, Seven Year Switch

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”
― Mario Vargas-Llosa

“With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood