Joan Lingard Quotes

I love walking along Leith's waterfront and wandering around some of New Town's beautiful streets and squares, with their gorgeous Georgian architecture.

I've been in a New York City-based cabaret for the past seven years called The Citizens Band. It's possibly one of the most brilliant things I've ever been involved with.

I've actually met quite a few of my heroes from the past.

I can't imagine anybody who showed up at Firestone for the first time who felt like they knew it better than I did. For me to travel to Akron the first time, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't wait, I know every hole on this golf course. I know the big water tower with the Firestone ball on top, I grew up with this. Here it is! It's real!'

I grew up in Jersey. I've been to the Jersey Shore countless times. I've lived it.

When I was growing up, I remember having read all the books in the library. I often tried to emulate my favourite writers.

When I visited Moscow for the first time in 1998, I wandered into the historic Metropol Hotel as a curious tourist simply to ogle the giant painted glass ceiling that hangs over the grand restaurant off the lobby. It was the memory of that short visit that prompted me, some years later, to set 'A Gentleman in Moscow' in the hotel.

I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher's time in Downing Street, and as I didn't own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.

You know people probably don't realize this but I lived in Denver for 10 years as a kid. I was familiar with the city and what it had to offer. You know like any place it's changed a lot over the years. But that familiarity hit home for me.

I was in my final year in college when I acted in 'Nanda Gokula.'

When I was studying in Canada, we were so free.

My four years in college, I cherished very much the opportunity to be able to stay at home.

I don't need a set of message board points to tell me that people are hurting in my state. I know it because I've lived it.

I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.

I went to high school in Stockton, CA.

People may say different things about Noida, but I had fun when I was staying there.

You're not really going to know what a place is like 'til you've lived there a few years - you sort of just have to go with your gut.

Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief. It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.

I told John Kerry and General Allen, the Americans’ expert, ‘We live here, I live here, I know what we need to ensure the security of Israel’s people.’

I didn't know the comic at all, which is really funny because I grew up here and I had friends who worked at all of the places. Like The Beguiling, which is a store here, and Suspect Video and one of my friends actually worked at Suspect and The Beguiling. So it's kind of crazy that I'd never known the books before.

When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.