National Book Award For Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Well they were going to have to do a whole lot better than this if they wanted us Creeds to feel bad. If they thought they could hurt me or dad just by messing with my head at a tryout and cutting me from the team they had another thing coming. If there is one thing we Creeds knew how to succeed at, it was failure. — Perry Moore

The novel remains for me one of the few forms ... where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world. — John Cheever

I'm just saying, when you're a disobedient little subordinate, you get that tight pussy worked so hard that it hurts just to sit down!" He said. — Clara Bryan

The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. — Sigmund Freud

Don't be distracted by doubters. — Kid Ink

LOUIS SACHAR is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Christopher Award. He is also the author of Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake; Small Steps, winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Cardturner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Parents' Choice Gold Award recipient, and an ALA-YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. His books for younger readers include There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many others. — Louis Sachar

The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. In false theories, the contrary is the case. — William Whewell

When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Reading fiction - excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers - has been shown to enhance theory of mind: — Margaret Heffernan

They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality. — Albert Camus

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again. — Roger Ebert

Some authority on parenting once said, "Hold them very close and then let them go." This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in). — Bill Cosby

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end. — Errol Morris

I think you're a dangerous, corrupt, lying piece of nine-day-old mosquito shit. — Hugh Laurie

But she is right, at least in this: Looking to promote oneself at the expense of other women, setting oneself up as a creature unlike any other, is paltry device, and one that has kept us women 'in our place' for as much of time as history can recall. — Sinead Murphy

Expenditures rise to meet income. — C. Northcote Parkinson

I loved 'Rocky' and 'Rambo', and am very proud of them. — Sylvester Stallone