Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers.
Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.
The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.
Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.
In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Without doubt, President [Barack] Obama is a great historical figure.
No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
Envy and fear are the only passions to which no pleasure is attached.
I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.
In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.
I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.
I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.
The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.