Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.
Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.
It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling
Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.