Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A joke is necessary at this time.
If you want to do things, do things.
Art's too long and life's too short.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
Art is too long, and life is too short.
The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
Write from what you know into what you don't know.
For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.
I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
I write for the still, small possibility of justice.
Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.
The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.
We write about what we don't know about what we know.
Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.
In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.
I often see through things right to the apparition itself.
Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?
I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven.
To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.
Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.
You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.
Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.
No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.
The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.
Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.
That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.
I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.
I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.
Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.