Connie Willis Quotes

Best Quotes by Connie Willis (Top 10)

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?
Connie Willis
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).
Connie Willis
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?
Connie Willis
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
Connie Willis
The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.
Connie Willis
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.
Connie Willis
You'd help if you could, wouldn't you, boy?" I said. "It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by-
Connie Willis
One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.
Connie Willis
No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.
Connie Willis
And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Connie Willis

More Connie Willis Quotes

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.
Connie Willis
I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.
Connie Willis
That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.
Connie Willis
The entire range of human experience is present in a church choir, including, but not restricted to jealousy, revenge, horror, pride, incompetence (the tenors have never been on the right note in the entire history of church choirs, and the basses have never been on the right page), wrath, lust and existential despair.
Connie Willis
One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.
Connie Willis
There are some things worth giving up anything for, even your freedom, and getting rid of your period is definitely one of them.
Connie Willis
The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure." "They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek. "No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality.
Connie Willis
I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.
Connie Willis
Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me. "I don't need anything to read," I said. "I'll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you." "I thought you might sit on the mag," he said. "It's extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.
Connie Willis
Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.
Connie Willis
To do something for someone or something you loved-England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history-wasn't a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.
Connie Willis
Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.
Connie Willis
He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door—to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?—would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too—in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?
Connie Willis