Douglas Kennedy quotes:

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

We all want to fix things. Just as we all believe that so much in life can be rectified. Mend fences, build bridges, reach out, engage in mutual healing.

Words matter, words have import.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

... we seemed to possess a similar worldview: slightly jaded, fiercely independent ..."

But the strangest of all sensations is the moment after you have been freed of the baby--and the baby of you--and you are handed this tiny shriveled creature to hold for the first time... and you feel a mixture of unbelievable instant love and desperate fear.

The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

There is much to be said for solitude.

We can never change the story that made us what we are. It's a story accumulated by the manifold complexities-its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got; all that we got but never wanted; all that was found and lost.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

There were moments when I felt seriously unhinged; when I was convinced that I would never, ever recover from what had happened, when it was absolutely clear to me that life from this point on would be constant agony ...

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them--not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.