Mark Helprin Quotes

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Mark Helprin

Profession : Novelist

Birth : June 28, 1947

If it wasn't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

Mark Helprin

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

Mark Helprin

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

I've never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can't even remain in the same room with coffee.

Mark Helprin

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

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

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

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

Mark Helprin

When people ask me why is 'Winter's Tale' a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.

Mark Helprin

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

Mark Helprin

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

Mark Helprin

The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.

Mark Helprin

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

The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.

Mark Helprin

When I was very young, I used to clean up after my parents. If I stay in a hotel, I make the bed and clean the room when I get up, even the bathroom mirror, for which I carry a tiny bottle of ammonia.

Mark Helprin

In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else's version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it.

Mark Helprin

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

My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.

Mark Helprin

I have jumped out of airplanes but I was not technically a paratrooper. I was an infantryman and a night fighter, anti-terrorist.

Mark Helprin

The thing that strikes you most about being a soldier in a war zone and in action to the small extent that I was, when actually people start shooting, which happened to me a couple of times, everything goes on automatic and there's a feeling of tremendous elevation and even elation.

Mark Helprin