Diane Johnson Quotes

#1. Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

Diane Johnson

#2. Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow.

Diane Johnson

#3. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Diane Johnson

#4. The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

Diane Johnson

#5. A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen.

Diane Johnson

#6. It didn't seem fair that you could not prevent being the object of other people's emotions, you were not safe from their hate
or from their love, for that matter. You were never safe from being invaded by their feelings when you wanted only to be rid of them, free, off, away.

Diane Johnson

#7. Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

Diane Johnson

#8. A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

Diane Johnson

#9. Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel.

Diane Johnson

#10. Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

Diane Johnson

#11. But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Diane Johnson

#12. In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other.

Diane Johnson

#13. Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

Diane Johnson

#14. Is this not in fact the purpose of young Americans going abroad? To make them think of things they never thought of?

Diane Johnson