Quotes Tagged "familiarity"

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

I discovered that the answers to which I had been seeking reside within familiarity. Following this epiphany, I let every life experience be my spirit guide.

We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.

To a particular person, a particular personality, mind, lifestyle, voice, gait, laugh, salary, penis, or vagina, cannot be interesting for a very long time.

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.

My philosophy is familiarity breeds contempt.

I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.