Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
Quietness is the beginning of virtue. To be silent is to be beautiful. Stars do not make a noise.
But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.
No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.
An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.
You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.
A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.
Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.
Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.
When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.
Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.
I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.
I want to die in my own way. It's my illness, my death, my choice. This is what saying yes means.
The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.
The cloven-foot of self-interest was now and then to be seen aneath the robe of public principle.
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.
In theory, the Internet should bring us all closer together and slowly eliminate our differences.
I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
On this battlefield man has no better weapon than his intelligence, no other force but his heart.
The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.
Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.
there's a lot more satisfaction in thinking about money than in spending it, if people only knew.
As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.
Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.
For me being depressed means you can spend all day in bed, and still not get a good night's rest.
The 'creator' and the 'editor' - two halves of the writer whole - should sleep in separate rooms.
Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of reach of sharks" "Yes, sir, of sharks and men.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.
The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime.
I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.
Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.
Life doesn't work out the way we plan, but maybe it works out the way it's supposed to after all.