Arthur Phillips Quotes

#1. Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug.

Arthur Phillips

#2. But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.

Arthur Phillips

#3. 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.

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

#5. Every secret is a wrinkle.

Arthur Phillips

#6. How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.

Arthur Phillips

#7. 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.

Arthur Phillips

#8. 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.

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

#10. You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

Arthur Phillips

#11. The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?

Arthur Phillips

#12. I am notorious for always having two beagles with me, in any and all circumstances.

Arthur Phillips

#13. Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

#16. 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.

Arthur Phillips

#17. 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.

Arthur Phillips

#18. 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

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

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

Arthur Phillips

#21. It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.

Arthur Phillips

#22. 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.

Arthur Phillips

#23. If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.

Arthur Phillips

#24. I like Shakespeare. I like some of his work a lot.

Arthur Phillips

#25. Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.

Arthur Phillips

#26. How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

Arthur Phillips

#27. 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 ...

Arthur Phillips

#28. 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?

Arthur Phillips