Nana Patekar Quotes

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

If I would make a song dedicated to any woman, it would have to be my mom because, you know, she's been there since I came out of her. She would have to be the one... my mom or my daughter.

Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers.

Growing up, books were my lifeline, and I owe a debt to those writers that can never be repaid. They saved my sanity and gave me a world I could escape to. If I can pay that forward to another person, that's all I ask.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer.

People forget that everyone has feelings, regardless of their career choice.

I don't fall in love with inanimate objects. I don't bond with them. I only fall in love with people.

Jail doesn't teach anyone to do good, nor Siberia, but a man-yes! A man can teach another man to do good-believe me!

Love? I need a lot of love." Of course you do. Everyone does. It's funny that we never say it. It's OK to scream, 'I'm starving' in public if you are hungry; it's OK to make a fuss and say, 'I'm so sleepy', if you are tired; but somehow we cannot say, 'I need some more love.' Why can't we say it? It's just as basic a need." - ONE NIGHT @ THE CALL CENTER Chapter 36 pages 293-4

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike. Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

I hope I'm at least half the dad that he didn't have to be.

The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.

The first ideas of religion arose, not from contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.