46 Quotes by Douglas Kennedy

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

We can never change the story that made us what we are. It's a story accumulated by the manifold complexities-its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got; all that we got but never wanted; all that was found and lost.

There is much to be said for solitude.