James Frey Quotes

Fear, he said, ran all of our lives. Fear, he said, after religion, was the most destructive force in the world.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

The one word love means too little for what it is. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love.

I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I’ve never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it’s great that they keep people interested in literature.

Being a writer now is about so much more than writing. There's publishing, touring, marketing, web presence.

I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

What is the meaning of life?Whatever you want it to be.

To say that you can't see echoes of the past in what I do would be absurd. Everything that has preceded me has affected me.

The way America works, and the way L.A. works, is a very small percentage of people get what they want out of life, and a much greater percentage try very very hard and they don't. That's just the way it is.

I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I hadn't learned yet that everybody's locked up some way or other. That's how life is we're all imprisoned by something.

This moment and this chance, they are the same, and they are mine if I choose them,and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye, don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving.

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

I'm tired of making people sad and I'm tired of disappointing them and I'm tired of seeing them break. I have seen this too many times. He will be the last.

Live and let live, do not judge, take life as it comes and deal with it, everything will be okay.

I love the process of being alone in a room.

But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.

I look at pastries and cakes, tarts and pies. My body craves sugar, always craves sugar. Years of alcohalism and the high level of sugar in alcohal created the craving, which I feed with candy and soda.

For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

Most of the time, it's not the concept, but the execution of craft that counts.

There is no such things as God's word on earth. Or if there is it is not to be found in books. -Then where is it to be found?- In love. In the laughter of children. In a gift given. In a life saved. In the quiet of morning. In the dead of night. In the sound of the ocean, or the sound of a car. It can be found in anything, anywhere. It is the fabric of our lives, our feelings, the people we live with, things we know to be real.

I don't care what people come at me with. People have come at me with everything you could imagine. I could care less about that.

Love only brought me lonliness and horror.

I want as much time in the darkness as I can possibly have. The darkness provides cover, the darkness provides places to hide and the darkness provides comfort. Darkness usually comes around dinner, but dinner would be too obvious.

There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

There are never words for the strongest of our feelings. There is just the pain that we cannot share. Pain we must all feel alone.

For the worst things of our lives, it is sometimes the best way, to never speak of them again.

I'm married, I have a couple kids, I've traveled a lot, I've done book tours a lot, I'm happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.

A contest was held in 1994 to rename the Los Angeles Convention and Exhibition Center after an extensive renovation and expansion. The winning name, chosen from over ten thousand entries, was the Los Angeles Convention Center.

I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray. I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming. I went down. When I got up, I turned around and started throwing punches." (James Frey, pg.1)

I'm trying to influence the next generation or two generations or three generations behind me. That's a big ambition of mine.

Its not just a smile of momentary happiness. When it disappears from my face, it will stay with me.

But we are what we are, and humans will always hate.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

I sleep during the day. I still dream about drinking and drugs. Sometimes I wake to a hang-over, sometimes I wake to a trickle of blood from my nose, sometimes I wake scared and shaking. I read, go to museums and visit Lilly in the afternoon. Sometimes I read to her, sometimes I talk to her, sometimes I just sit and remember the times, remember the times, remember the times." (James Frey, pg.119)

When something is staring you in the face in your life and you see it with your own two eyes and feel it within your heart only a fool doesn't believe it to be true.

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

And even though people try to pretend that pain doesn't do anything to them, none of us can really handle it. Everything bad we do in our life is because of pain of some kind.

We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence.

I think God is something that people use to avoid reality. I think faith allows people to reject what is right in front of our eyes, which is that thing, this life, this existence, this consciousness, or whatever word you want to use for it, is all we have, and all we'll ever have. I think people have faith because they want and need to believe in something, whatever that something is, because life can be hard and depressing and brutal if you don't.