Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207
All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, and appreciated a little.
All the sciences are, in some measure, linked with each other, and before the one is ended, the other begins.
Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.
Make friends. Be a leader. Kiss butts if you have to, but if the other guys despise you-you know what I mean?
Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth.
I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.
The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.
Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.
Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.
A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.
I think my methods are more suggestive than assertive. Check out those passages again and see what you think.
I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.
Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don't.
How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.
The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.
Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can.
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.
The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.
Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.
Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.
We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench
I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.
The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.
She shouldn't leave you. Or you shouldn't leave her. I haven't worked it out yet. But you shouldn't be apart.
Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.