James Frey Quotes

#1. That's how life works. You know it when you know it.
They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here.
They're on a sixteen-line highway.
Driving west.

James Frey

#2. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

James Frey

#3. Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

James Frey

#4. There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live.

James Frey

#5. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

James Frey

#6. I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

James Frey

#7. Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something

James Frey

#8. I've been alone my whole life, I can't do it anymore.

James Frey

#9. Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.

James Frey

#10. I want to run or die or get fucked up. I want to be blind and dumb and have no heart. I want to crawl in a hole and never come out. I want to wipe my existence straight off the map. Straight off the fucking map.

James Frey

#11. What is the meaning of life?Whatever you want it to be.

James Frey

#12. Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.

James Frey

#13. If you're gonna cry, cry because of all the good times we had, and all the laughs, and all the fun shit we did, and cry because those memories make you happy.

James Frey

#14. When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

James Frey

#15. There is one thing. One thing that haunts me from page one to page twenty-two. I have never spoken of it. I have never told another person

James Frey

#16. I can run fast when I want to run fast, and I've always been good at destroying things.

James Frey

#17. Sleep is still difficult I sleep for three or four hours a day. Usually sometime in the afternoon. I walk in the cold, keep myself numb. I cry less, and less. (James Frey, pg.88)

James Frey

#18. But we are what we are, and humans will always hate.

James Frey

#19. Practice not wanting, desiring, judging, doing, fighting, knowing. Practice just being. Everything will fall into place.

James Frey

#20. I wonder why they still love me and why I can't love them back and how two normal stable people could have created something like me, lived with something like me, and tolerated something like me.

James Frey

#21. Live and let live, do not judge, take life as it comes and deal with it, everything will be okay.

James Frey

#22. They say confront the difficult while it is easy, accomplish the great one step at a time. They say let things come and let things go and live without possession and live without expectation.

James Frey

#23. L.A is a huge place, literally and metaphorically. Its beauty and horror. Its unconventional history. Its draw and allure. Its diversity and segregation.

James Frey

#24. It's the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?

James Frey

#25. Its not just a smile of momentary happiness. When it disappears from my face, it will stay with me.

James Frey

#26. We got this gift of life and we got it one time and we gonna get hurt in it and be hurt going through it and the only thing that'll make that hurt better or hurt less is love.

James Frey

#27. But love is different for every person. For some it's hate, for some it's joy, for some it's fear, for some it's jealousy, for some it's torture, for some it's peace. For some it's everything.

James Frey

#28. I always wanted to be the outlaw. And that's to a certain extent how I've lived.

James Frey

#29. What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.

James Frey

#30. Whether they are accepted or not isn't important. What is important is the act of apologizing, the act of admitting fault, the act of asking for forgiveness.

James Frey

#31. The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

James Frey

#32. She feels and she cries. It is to be admired.

James Frey

#33. Faith is the fool's excuse.

James Frey

#34. Because I'll never be any better. I'll never be any more normal and I'll never make the pain go away. Never ever ever.

James Frey

#35. The feeling of arms around me, of love in my heart, it was more powerful than any of the negativity I knew was existing in the world for me. That feeling of love killed it all.

James Frey

#36. I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.

James Frey

#37. Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

James Frey

#38. I used to think i was tough, but then i realized i wasn't. i was fragile and i wore thick fucking armor. and i hurt people so they couldn't hurt me. and i thought that was what being tough was, but it isn't.

James Frey

#39. Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

James Frey

#40. Part of me still loves. More of me doesn't.

James Frey

#41. I'm married, I have a couple kids, I've traveled a lot, I've done book tours a lot, I'm happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.

James Frey

#42. If there is beauty, there is ugliness. If there is good, there is bad. Being and nonbeing and difficult and easy and high and low and long and short and before and after and need, depend, create and define each other.

James Frey

#43. I'm just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it's any good or not.

James Frey

#44. Even a second of freedom is worth more than a lifetime of bondage.

James Frey

#45. 1954. Smog prevents airplanes from landing and ships from docking for three days.

James Frey

#46. The best stories are universal stories that have been told for as long as humanity has existed it's just figuring out new ways to do it, with language, with structure. And so I'm always trying to do that.

James Frey

#47. In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.

James Frey

#48. You don't have to follow anybody's conventions.

James Frey

#49. I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

James Frey

#50. Being a writer now is about so much more than writing. There's publishing, touring, marketing, web presence.

James Frey

#51. When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.

James Frey

#52. There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.

James Frey

#53. I listen to the tick of an unseen clock marking moments of time long passed ...

James Frey

#54. I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

James Frey

#55. Jovinderpihainu breaks it. You are right to ask, Shari. But there is a difference between being honest and being right. Honest men lie all the time, believing that they tell the truth. Much evil is borne on the back of honest

James Frey

#56. Coming after all the bullshit related to A Million Little Pieces, nobody was expecting anything from me. No publisher, no agent, no one. Just me and the book. It was great.

James Frey

#57. As we stand to leave, I look across the dining hall and through the glass at Lilly. She is smiling at me and the smile hurts.

James Frey

#58. That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

James Frey

#59. I hold beneath pale green.

James Frey

#60. Los Angeles is a lonely city. Everyone is focused on advancement success fame and money, it is hard to adjust to a culture based on always wanting more, on never being satisfied.

James Frey

#61. Be patient and wait. Your mud will settle. Your water will be clear.

James Frey

#62. No one wants to die alone, even though that's how it happens to all of us, even though we pretend there's some other ways.

James Frey

#63. That was beautiful.
She is holding my hand.
No, it wasn't.
If she let go, I would fall apart.
It was. It was beautiful because it was honest and it was beautiful because it hurt and it was beautiful because you didn't have to tell it to me.
Fall apart.
It makes me feel like shit.

James Frey

#64. But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.

James Frey

#65. The past doesn't matter. People cling to it because it allows them to ignore the present.

James Frey

#66. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing things and not allowing things outside of myself to distract me or bother me or affect me in any way.

James Frey

#67. Enemies are a given. Friends are not.

James Frey

#68. When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.

James Frey

#69. A miracle is changing someone's life. Freeing them from whatever bonds them. Giving them the gift of being able to live the way they dream of living.

James Frey

#70. Be content with what you have and take joy in the way things are. When you realize you have all you need, the World belongs to you.

James Frey

#71. And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.

James Frey

#72. I learned to read at a young age and I have always read voraciously. It is one of the few things, aside from getting fucked up and getting in trouble, that I have done consistently throughout my entire life.

James Frey

#73. Dreams can come true there [Los Angeles]in ways impossible anywhere else, and they can get destroyed as well.

James Frey

#74. A small portion of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes are enshrined at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple in Pacific Palisades. They are the only portion of Gandhi's remains that are kept anywhere outside of India.

James Frey

#75. There are places from which you cannot return. There is damage that can be irreparable.

James Frey

#76. There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

James Frey

#77. When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

James Frey

#78. Thank you Lilly, Leonard, MIles, I love you and I thank you

James Frey

#79. When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

James Frey

#80. What someone calls my books is irrelevant to me. I consider them works of art and rules and categories and labels mean nothing.

James Frey

#81. I think about her. I think about the first time I saw her.. I had a book in my hand and I was reading and for some reason I looked up ... She didn't see me. She didn't see me, but I saw her.

James Frey

#82. I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going.

James Frey

#83. When things are tough, and when I don't think I can last another minute, if I just hold on, hold on tight and with everything I got, the shit gets better.

James Frey

#84. In Lilly's eyes her beautiful clear water eyes there is what I have sought and never found, wanted and never had, hoped for and never discovered. Love.

James Frey

#85. To write a damn good thriller, you need a killer attitude.

James Frey

#86. I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

James Frey

#87. And even though people try to pretend that pain doesn't do anything to them, none of us can really handle it. Everything bad we do in our life is because of pain of some kind.

James Frey

#88. On the left side of my cheek a row of crusted scabbed stitches hold a deep 1 inch-long gash together. My nose is bent and swollen beneath its bandage and red lines streak from my nostrils. There are black and yellow bruises beneath both eyes, there is blood both wet and dry everywhere. (James Frey)

James Frey

#89. All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost.

James Frey

#90. When something is staring you in the face in your life and you see it with your own two eyes and feel it within your heart only a fool doesn't believe it to be true.

James Frey

#91. I know people might think I'm strong or tough, but I'm really not. I'm a sheep in wolf's clothing.

James Frey

#92. I choose to be the person that i want to be

James Frey

#93. If you care about what other people think, you will always be their prisoner.

James Frey

#94. You don't have to follow anybody's rules.

James Frey

#95. People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness, so they place the blame on something that they're not responsible for, like disease or genetics.

James Frey

#96. Hate me if you must, but know that I will never hate you.

James Frey

#97. Most of the time, it's not the concept, but the execution of craft that counts.

James Frey

#98. They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.

James Frey

#99. People call me all sorts of things. I don't even care what they call me.

James Frey

#100. Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with dignity, and just hold on.

James Frey