79 Quotes by Niall Williams

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.