35 Quotes by Zoe Heller

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi – such an abherration in their workaday mendacity – that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it...

It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside.

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination – an inability to tolerate mistery.

I’m a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

It’s hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

It’s clear that politeness to one’s elders can’t always be justified on the basis of the elder’s superior wisdom. It’s just that it’s not attractive to see a young person answering an older person back.