Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hollywood was a good influence because I was madly in love with films, and the films had a direct influence on me.
Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
The critics are generally wrong, or they're fifteen, twenty years late. It's a great shame. They miss out on a lot.
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.
Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead
Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion , now .
The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.
I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.
Life shoould be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at other move forward with it.
Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.
If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.
When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.
Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, 'I love you for what you do.'
You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
Fame and money are gifts given to us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.
Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.
I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway. Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
I can write faster on a typewriter than you can on a computer. I do 120 words a minute, and you can't do that on a computer.
If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.
Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.
This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.
The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.
Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority
It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.
Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.