Julia Glass Quotes

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.

I grew up in a home where animals were ever-present and often dominated our lives. There were always horses, dogs, and cats, as well as a revolving infirmary of injured wildlife being nursed by my sister the aspiring vet. Without any conscious intention on my part, animals come to play a significant role in my fiction: in Three Junes, a parrot and a pack of collies; in The Whole World Over, a bulldog named The Bruce. To dog lovers, by the way, I recommend My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley -- by far the best 'animal book' I've ever read.

And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.

Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.

I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.

Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compatibilities and tastes; on a respect for measurement, balance, chemistry and heat; on a history of countless errors overcome.

Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs.

There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

My publisher is generous with deadlines, which are never set in stone. Some writers need that pressure, but I am more productive when there's less panic.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.

All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.

Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.

Knowing and understanding the people we love most is a process that continues well beyond their deaths... and is never complete.

Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is, to me, the reward for all the private time invested. And I love teaching to a fault; I have a hard time not giving away a lot of my own writing energy to my students.