Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.
Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living
Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.
I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism.
That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.
Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.
I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.
I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.
He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.
...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.
If you're not riddled with doubt, you've probably done something wrong.
After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one’s demon.
I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.
Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
I don't shop as much as a lot of people but I do like designer clothes.
There's nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final.
Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!
And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
Only a spirit of artistic sincerity can console the souls of humankind.
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
Most love stories are nocturnal. That's what makes them so fascinating.
Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.
It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.
I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.
People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.
If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!
You can write about anything for children as long as you've got humour.
All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.
Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.
When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.
The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouths.
True sympathy is beyond what can be seen and touched and reasoned upon.
Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one.
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.