Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Of course not. You can't have a family hanging over you like a bunch of old dead goats. No offense.
Characters are story. And any great plot or subplot is driven by the characters' wants and desires.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
No man rides harder than my Lord Scamperdale - always goes as if he had a spare neck in his pocket.
Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb
Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.
What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? - Fool
I can't picture going to a beach, or anywhere on vacation, without a couple of books as companions.
Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!
language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.
And a proverb haunts my mind As a spell is cast, The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.
Everything you draw is influenced. It's like yogurt. You need a little bit to start the next batch.
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.
The magic of fiction seems to be the more specific you are, the more universal you end up becoming.
I wish the world was run by women. Women who have given birth and know the value of their creation.
You should tell her how nice her outfit is because her outfit is her choice whereas her face isn't.
Everyone else is either asleep or having sex. I’ve been watching cable television and eating jello.
Flight is romance - not in the sense of sexual attraction, but as an experience that enriches life.
If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.
Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
The impossible lives next door to the possible; people ring its door bell by accident all the time.
Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
But he thought all the strange words were beautiful, and he had never had a book of his own before.
I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home
You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.
Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.
Be careful, though." "Aren't I always?" "No, I think the word for how you usually are is 'reckless.
The brain is not an organ we are authorized to use. We are supposed to use only our hands and legs.
I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe were all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.
There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.