Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
I wasted the 1980s. I wasted every minute at Cambridge talking to people who knew more about music than I did.
Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.
Others find humanity by looking in their own hearts. Only lost souls need to search for it outside themselves.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.
There is no misery quite so wearing as the misery of a false position. It seems to slay the body and the soul.
Most older people don't talk about the past so they won't have to admit that their life ran on the wrong rail.
The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.
Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
no matter how hard and faithfully we may try we can never compensate another for some lack in his or her life.
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
All girls should have a poem written for them even if we have to turn this goddamn world upside down to do it.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.
I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.
The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.
And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
It is an inwariable rule with the dealers to praise the bad points and let the good 'uns speak for themselves.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?
One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.
Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.
Oh, happy triumph of the poet! - to hear his verses wedded to sweet sounds, and warbled by the woman he loves!
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.
I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.
The times when we need prayers or counsel, we are little like to be in a mood to learn, nor yet to understand.
It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
There are aspects of love that I once undervalued. Kindness. Having a sort of honor when love is on the table.
He couldn’t compare a woman to a torrentially beautiful monsoon, and then look surprised that he’d gotten wet.
You've got to use it, the pain. Use it as fuel to move past the torment, to the light at the end of the tunnel
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told, and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.