Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life.
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.
As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.
George theThird Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.
Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.
A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
I don't believe that there is any particular book that influenced any 'career' I might have.
Why is it the Mongols of this world always tell us they're defending us against the Mongols?
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
A Hallmark card with paragraphs about my beauty written by a stranger is vaguely depressing.
I guess mercy is a muscle like any other. You got to exercise it, or it just cramp right up.
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison.
To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.
There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.
Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.
... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.
Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.
Love is so holy, so confusing. It makes a man anxious, tormented. Love, how can I define it?
When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.
Youth has a right to go astray now and then Feeling themselves oppressed by the benevolence.
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.
You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.
Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.