Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.
I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!
I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.
Why are we scared of a '50s weepie? Why are we scared of a movie that pulls you in and punches you in the stomach?
One should not quarrel with a dog without a reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts of morality.
Snow reminds Ka of God! But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.
If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow.
because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.
My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.
You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life.
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.
In Spain," indeed! He would have got no closer than the Indies if I had not showed him how to do it. Stupid puppy.
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.
The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day.
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.
A feeling of disquiet continues to haunt me. As a youth one dreams of love; by the time one wakes, it is too late.
There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.
I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.
Sometimes we become what we see. Sometimes we take what we see and make it the model for what we refuse to become.
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.
I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.
In my darker moments, I feel like the Queen of England, bound and gagged by reverence. Tin-crowned and irrelevant.
I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.
Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.
On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.
The squiggly rubber Davy Jones face in 'Pirates' with the tentacles, barnacles and goobers - that's modeled on me.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way.
I'm spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.
I think we take it for granted that if you are with your husband after 30 years, then he is the love of your life.
I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.
There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else.
The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it was time I begin to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.