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… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
“You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.” — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
“Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share
“All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
“How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
“He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share
“She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point -… — Arthur Phillips Copy Share Image
