Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To be quite honest, the joyful relief of the publication of my book was short-lived.
The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.
When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
If you want to play the game of truth, I'll tell the truth, and the truth will burn.
Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.
Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.
Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.
Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward unbelievability.
After my conviction, I was devastated. I had never believed that I would be convicted.
It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.
The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.
I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.
I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.
It is not the man speaking through the woman, it is the woman speaking through the man.
... a little philosophy carries a man from God, but a great deal brings him back again.
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.
A feat - of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.
The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.
I can train a monkey to wave an American flag. That does not make the monkey patriotic.
The fault is in our stars, dear Brutus: not the glass screen through which we see them.
Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair.
All Modern Men are descended from a Wormlike creature but it shows more on some people.
I always carry a book with me to read on the bus, and I tend to arrive everywhere early.
I lost years of my life to prison because of two-dimensional and misogynist stereotypes.
It became normal for women on the internet to adopt gender-neutral or male screen names.
New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.
I am one of maybe three people in the world who knows anything about Robert W. Chambers.
Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood.
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.
Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.
We say that we care about the war, but we don't even really know what we're fighting for.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Caesar might have married Cleopatra, but he had a wife at home. There's always something.
Germany was the cause of Hitler as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune.
A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.
Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.
A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.
Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.
Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.
You can't simplify my taste and say, 'Parker likes big wines,' because it's just not true.
To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.
Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.