Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.
Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.
Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.
The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.
I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.
I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.
There are many evils in this country. The only remedy for every one of them is freedom for the nation.
It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.
And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.
Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad.
Focus on yourself -- do what you want, when you want, without having to consider anyone else's agenda.
But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be.
A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.
When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.
Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.
If it is your duty to croak like the toad, then go ahead! And with all your might! Make them hear you!
... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.
I'm very interested in animal behavior, and the relationship of human beings to other animal behavior.
In my stories, whenever there's somebody wonderful and charming and bright and intelligent, that's me!
I notice that when people have no sense of responsibility, you call them either criminals or geniuses.
... perhaps there is no conceit so arrogant as the conceit which follows a conviction of emancipation.
Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him - better days are coming.
Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
work is happiness. No one can take my work from me and therefore no one can take my happiness from me.
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.
I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out.
Besides, if you are who you claim to be, that makes you my true queen. Therefore, you have my loyalty.
I'm extremely unbearable. You know, I'm narcissistic and at the same time I'm very charming - I think.
Life isn’t fair. Fair is somewhere you go to ride the dodgems and win a goldfish. (from Rush of Blood)
It's very painful to be in debt. I'm the kind of person who would rather almost die than go into debt.
America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about.
But you do not think much about the stars. They are always there. Look at them when you have a moment.
Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Haves and the Have-nots.
And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.