Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.
The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.
The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul.
It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.
To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.
Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.
The secret of success in life is known only by those who have not succeeded.
I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
The major wars that the U.S. became involved in are all ethically defensible.
There are hundreds of good reasons for having a cat, but all you need is one.
The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men.
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.
You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.
The sense that someone else cares always helps because it is the sense of love.
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.