Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.
When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.
The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.
You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.
Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.
Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.
Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level.
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.
Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.
The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.
Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.
Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.
I pass through many Me's in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.
This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.
I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.
Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.
People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.
If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.
Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?
... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It’s simply part of being human.