Smartt Quotes & Sayings

Any dog can bed down a lot of females. But only a real man can love one woman for a lifetime. — Lisa Smartt

I don't call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I don't. — Madison Smartt Bell

Normally, most writers don't say, 'I'm going into a mild hypnotic trance.' Typically, they don't know how they do it. Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they're well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a 'flow state.' If you don't have trouble, you don't have to think about it. — Madison Smartt Bell

Imaginative writing has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft. — Madison Smartt Bell

To me, there is nothing more soothing than the song of a mosquito that can't get through the mesh to bite you. — Madison Smartt Bell

Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change. — Laurence Heller

Sometimes you don't get but one mistake, if the one you pick is bad enough. — Madison Smartt Bell

Nothing could have been prevented. But still you know that somehow something wasn't watching. Something let attention lapse, releasing everything that follows, as the weight falls from the air. — Madison Smartt Bell

Edwidge Danticat's prose has a Chekhovian simplicity
an ability to state the most urgent truths in a measured and patiently plain style that gathers a luminous energy as it moves inexorably forward. In this book she makes a strong case that art, for immigrants from countries where human rights and even survival are often in jeopardy, must be a vocation to witness if it is not to be an idle luxury. — Madison Smartt Bell

The country is too often assumed to be a backward place: The First World has trouble remembering that Haitians were two centuries ahead of us in abolishing slavery and in extending full rights of citizenship to everyone, regardless of race. — Madison Smartt Bell

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again. — Madison Smartt Bell

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay. — Christopher McQuarrie

One can't do anything alone in Haiti. Sharing and cooperation are so deeply woven into the culture that sometimes it's hard to have a separate thought. — Madison Smartt Bell

In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving. — Madison Smartt Bell

Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history. — Madison Smartt Bell

Wait a second, Carlie. You're not telling me you're letting Aunt Charlotte help you find a man for Clara? Are you serious? You think My Aunt Charlotte, who has a raccoon in the house and washes out Dixie bathroom cups, knows where the right guy is for Clara Johnson? — Lisa Smartt

If you're a disheveled, easily distracted person, it's always scary when someone asks what your plan is for the day. We don't know our plans.
Distracted people make plans in transit. — Lisa Smartt

True art is the intermediary between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities. — E.F. Schumacher

Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined. — Madison Smartt Bell

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. — Madison Smartt Bell

I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase 'pied a terre' became literal, material. — Madison Smartt Bell

I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That's my nature. — Madison Smartt Bell

Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself — Gary Comer

I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt. — Madison Smartt Bell

Don't be fooled, Clara. No one's new and shiny. Not really. — Lisa Smartt

John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style. — Madison Smartt Bell

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply. — Madison Smartt Bell

In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes). — Madison Smartt Bell

When you're married to somebody iconic, people tend to notice him. — Pattie Boyd

It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before. — Madison Smartt Bell