Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit.
I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.
Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.
[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.
Put two Yankees in a room together, and in an hour they will each have gained ten dollars from the other.
Never be passive. Victories happen when you take charge of a game. You can't win by playing not to lose".
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
Death is dreadfully personal, terribly important to oneself, and so unimportant to the rest of the world.
This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.
I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
I haven't any close friends. Friendship needs time to interact, sit down, gossip. I don't have that time.
You’re never ready for the truth. No matter how much you think you know, it always takes you by surprise.
Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.
It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.
The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.
When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.
Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can
Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?
Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.
We don't choose our talents; but we needn't hide them in a napkin because they are not just what we want.
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.
Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.
I'm sure I'll feel much more grateful when I find a guy who thinks complex wiring in a girl is a turn-on.
I have a glitch, too. Sometimes I forget that I’m not human. I don’t think that happens to most androids.
The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.
It's true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.
...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.
Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.
Green is the fresh emblem of well founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.
Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.
One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought
I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.
Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.
The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
A night of endless dreams, inconsequent and wild, is this my life; none more worth telling than the rest.