Mark Helprin Quotes
My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
One of the things I worked very hard on all my life was to be like everyone else. I tried very hard to fit in.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
When people ask me why is 'Winter's Tale' a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
You will most appreciate 'Freddy and Fredericka' if you are familiar with the story of the Fall, the Good Hermit, 'Tom Jones,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Paradise Lost,' 'Henry V,' and 'My Cousin Vinny.' That doesn't mean that you can't enjoy or understand it on an emotional level, free of all allusion, which is the test of any book of fiction.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
I have been fighting over commas all my life.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
I used to write exclusively with one particular Montblanc fountain pen, although lately I have had to use a roller-tip fountain pen, because I find it harder and harder to control the fine muscles of my right hand during prolonged periods of work. I buy boxes of Deluxe Uni-ball pens, use them until they start to drag, and then change.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
Unlike Hezbollah, Israel's more modest aim is to survive, and that it has done.
Mark Helprin
American novelist
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