James Patterson Life Quotations

Somebody said the key to life is to work hard, play hard, rest hard, and I've pretty much adopted that.

There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do - or would want to see in real life.

My life revolves around my writing, my wife and my son.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls...are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.

I don't know why, but life is usually more complicated than the plans that we make.

Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?

Seize what's been handed you. Make smart decisions. Make decisions because life is a temporary situation.

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

Save your world. Love it. Protect it, and respect it and don't let haters represent it. Don't leave the saving to anyone else, ever, because, exhibit A - why, hello there - it's way too much for one person. And if you want to skip out on the responsibility train, my whole life - and death - will have been in vain. It's yours. It's all yours for taking! You're not going to waste it now, are you?

But what is life if you don't live it?

Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.

I write larger than life. It's what I do.

and I think that everything in life is kind of unreal, isn't it?

living life was like putting the beach into a jar. The point wasn’t to fit everything in; it was to attend to the most important things first—the big, beautiful rocks—the most valuable people and experiences—and fit the lesser things in around them. Otherwise, the best things might get left out

They're afraid of change, and we must change. They're afraid of the young, and we are the young. They're afraid of music, and music is our life. They're afraid of books, and knowledge, and ideas. They're most afraid of our magic.