Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.
In love, somehow, a man's heart is always either exceeding the speed limit, or getting parked in the wrong place.
The possession of a great many things, even the best of things, tends to blind one to the real value of anything.
Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.
I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience - which is definitely an acquired taste.
Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
The book has had a good run. For 550 years, it was the most practical way to deliver writing to multiple readers.
We often think our legacy will be our achievements. But often our legacy will be whether we set a moral standard.
Professionally and personally, I try to be as agnostic as possible, try to see things as objectively as possible.
I don't believe in the very concept of "first thing in the morning." I'm a "third thing in the afternoon" fellow.
So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny.
When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization - any kind of civilization - disappears.
There are real radical Muslim groups out there that really are pretty villainous. You don't have to make them up.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon.
If you only take offense when the president of your party is compared to Hitler, then you're part of the problem.
I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions.
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
When liberals clamor for 'diversity,' they don't necessarily mean they are ready to tolerate actual disagreement.
There's a difference between using the word to insult somebody and using it to start a journalistic conversation.
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Washington knows that it is not safe to kick people who are down until you find out what their next stop will be.
I want to have schools and libraries and other institutions named after me. I tell my daughter that all the time.
A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.
Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.
I hated the mirror and avoided it as much as I could. A glimpse would only remind me: I'll never be normal again.
When you get older, two things happen to you. You begin to lose your hearing, and I forget what the other one is.
Fifty seven million children across the world don't want an iPhone, Xbox or chocolates. They want a book and pen.
I don't want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn't exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world.
I enjoy science, and I'm a very curious person. I always want to know the reason behind everything, big or small.
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.
African-American voters are not nearly as enthusiastic about [Hillary] Clinton as they were about [Barack] Obama.
I recognise my old self in a lot of the letters I get from single women who are unrealistic about what they want.
One of the things which separates British and American culture is the reverence for the flag in American culture.
The fact that you fell out of bed makes some people think you had more than one drink before you called for help.
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
I may have been the only candidate in America who failed to ride the wave of anti-establishment anger to victory.
Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.
Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either.
We have a terror of seeming to exert ourselves, lest it be noticed that we exerted ourselves and did not succeed.
Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It's possible that both are right.
On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.
I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.