Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway.
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.
I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?
I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.