Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.
Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could.
I'll admit that it's not easy to get an agent, but becoming successful in anything requires perseverance.
I love you," he finally whispered. She leaned forward and touched his face. "I know. And I love you, too.
Setting is a major aspect in writing all of my books, both in terms of natural and cultural environments.
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.
When there aren't any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.
You're a monster. Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise? No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable.
Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood.
Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
People never realize how much work impacts there self esteem and sense of purpose until they leave a job.
I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.
Although I may express myself with some degree of pleasantry the purport of my words is entirely serious.
A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.
Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.
Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised
It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.
You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.
There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin.
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
Since Freud, people think you either want to be a man or hate men. You only exist in relationship to men.
she had something I could not have, and so I resented her—but I realized the fault was mine and not hers.
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely.
Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.
Even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.
The truth is, when it gets really quiet, when the silence gets too loud, i really start to miss everyone.