Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
If there is work there is warmth, that when a man has freedom of movement it is enough, for then his blood is hot too
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
I have always written. I was one of those kids who would always fill exercise books with girls and telepathic ponies.
in mad people fear goes on constantly, night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in.
Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.
Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.
We must remember how to love, remember what's important, and remember God's truth as it applies to our relationships.
Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed.
There's no black and no white, just shades of grey...But the small betrayals lead to bigger ones, morality is eroded.
It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.
And one more thing...You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab.
I'll pour you the first one and after that, if you don't have one, it's your own f****** fault. You know where it is.
real misery delights not in reproaches and complaints. It is like charity and love - silent, long suffering and mild.
Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.
The more tickets you have in a lottery, the worse your chance. And it is the same of virtues, in the lottery of life.
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn.
Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.
I only mean to say that I have a feeling that it never was intended I should live long. I'm not like the rest of you.
She fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable.
Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything.
As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.
I dont call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I dont.
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others.
The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.
He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.
Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
You can't change the desert. You can only take the fastest course through it. Wishing it's an oasis won't make it so.
Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.
Sorrow was made for man, not for beasts; yet if men encourage melancholy too much, they become no better than beasts.
My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.
It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.
Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don't seem to suspect it.
I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.
Too many people seem to believe that silence was a void that needed to be filled, even if nothing important was said.
When I was seventeen, I don't think I even knew what love was. But when it's right, it's right, and you just know it.
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.
The ingratitude of the world can never deprive us of the conscious happiness of having acted with humanity ourselves.