Laura Z. Hobson Quotes & Sayings

Any life he'd ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions - love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added pull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about 'quiet desperation' - that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting. — Laura Z. Hobson

I rewrite everything, almost idiotically. I rewrite and work and work, and rewrite and rewrite some more. — Laura Z. Hobson

I grew up in an agnostic broad-minded family. — Laura Z. Hobson

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it. — Laura Z. Hobson

Why didn't children ever see that they could damage and harm their parents as much as parents could damage and harm children? — Laura Z. Hobson

Writers talk about the agony of writing; I talk about the agony of not writing. — Laura Z. Hobson

We are born in innocence ... Corruption comes later. The first fear is a corruption, the first reaching for something that defies us. The first nuance of difference, the first need to feel better than the different one, more loved, stronger, richer, more blessed
these are corruptions. — Laura Z. Hobson

I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with. — Laura Z. Hobson

I think of myself as a plain human being who happens to be an American. — Laura Z. Hobson