Hirshberg Quotes & Sayings

...I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer. — Glen Hirshberg

More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could. — Glen Hirshberg

We as consumers really do have the right to know what's in our food, — Gary Hirshberg

Superior quality is a prerequisite to entering the game. By definition, an entrepreneur is undercapitalized relative to the status quo. Therefore, if you enter a product that is either at parity with the leaders, or not as good, you won't even get to the starting line. — Gary Hirshberg

Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don't see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity and then you die — Gary Hirshberg

The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place to sell joy or buy it, hunt company or flee it, trust yourself or your friends or your instincts, stretch the hours as much as you could, and one day vanish. ("Safety Clowns") — Glen Hirshberg

A good book written for children can be read by adults. — Norton Juster

I'm a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office's waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day. — Glen Hirshberg

Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content
the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons. — Aimee Bender

There can be no progress on climate change without strong and aggressive leadership from the White House. While we have been frustrated that it took until now, we find that the President's plan contains plenty of smart proposals and pathways for action. Stonyfield stands firmly behind the President's vision. — Gary Hirshberg

Love is a beautiful man bearing caffeine. — Sierra Dean

Even if you've sworn to yourself never to read vampire fiction again, do yourself the favor of reading Motherless Child. Glen Hirshberg has crafted a compelling, heartbreaking thriller full of character, grit, and sorrow. Bravo — Christopher Golden

I believe in the power of one. — Gary Hirshberg

Every time I fall in love with a book, I just feel grateful and thrilled to have it in my life. — Glen Hirshberg

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school. — Kyp Malone

This morning I was a servant, tonight I'm a princess. How much more will change? — Victoria Aveyard

Richard Shindell works impressive alchemy with the plainest, most primal American pop melodies. — Glen Hirshberg

Need a fourth?' he asked, earning himself a set of strangely satisfying startled glances. The only way the moment might have been better would be if El had taught Marty the game. But that had been his grandfather, years and years ago. The white-haired man smiled. 'You know how to play?'

'I'd need a card.'

'Card?' Then understanding dawned on the white-haired man's face. He shook his head. Again, he looked kind. 'Ah. Of course. Jew Mah Jongg. Entirely different game.'

His companions were nodding, too. The guy with the belt buckle said, 'Completely different. Very frustrating. So few ways to win. So many to lose.'

Yet again, Marty felt tears well in his eyes. His uncle's absence seeping in. 'Yep,' he said. 'Sounds like a Jewish game, alright.'

("Shomer") — Glen Hirshberg

He smiled. How kind of you to confirm what I already know. Perhaps next you will introduce me to myself. I hear I am quite popular. — Meredith Duran

The secret to my success is I know what I don't know and I hire people smarter than me. — Gary Hirshberg

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it. — Peter Straub

Castleford looked up lazily. He turned his gaze on Summerhays. "What is wrong with him, to get him all puffed up like he holds a bad wind that needs farting?" "Fate. Passion. The stupidity of life." Castleford drank some coffee. "In other words, he has fallen in love. — Madeline Hunter

Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway. — Glen Hirshberg

But I can't help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer's trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke.

And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I've always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy; fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others.

("Dancing Men") — Glen Hirshberg

It has taken my whole life thus far to see how being brave enough to hold on to a question, brave enough to never stop looking for answers, and brave enough to take action even when I didn't know the right answer, was as brave as I needed to be to succeed and to succeed with love. — Andrea T. Goeglein

Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it as a brute fact ... I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. — Paul Davies

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. — John C. Maxwell

My counsel to entrepreneurs is to 'own' a region, 'own' a market, 'own' a segment. Create something you can defend. Don't get hung up on the idea that you have to go national. — Gary Hirshberg

Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work. — Glen Hirshberg

Drifting on the black, rippling surface were fingers. Thumbs. Dozens of them. Hundreds, floating like dead fish in a dynamited pond. I saw part of an ear. The lights went out. — Glen Hirshberg

American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg. — Dennis Etchison

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am. — Glen Hirshberg

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It's the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck. — Glen Hirshberg