Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in Rhodesia on my father's ranch and every year he used to take us on safari in some remote area of the wilderness.
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them
What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.
I don't like killing a girl," the Spaniard said. "God does it all the time; if it doesn't bother Him, don't let it worry you.
Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.
Women are cats ... and love to scratch even those they're fond of. Sometimes the more they love them the harder they scratch.
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
And only weaklings...who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.
The intimacy. The deepest level of love. The knowledge that someone understands you, is rooting for you, is sharing your life.
Oh, no, I'm not brave. When a thing is certain, there's nothing to be brave about. All you can do is to find your consolation.
There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.
Talk and tea is his specialty," said Giles. "He has about five cups of tea a day. But he works splendidly when we are looking.
Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.
When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.
A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.
The discovery that it is in our power to change our lives by the thoughts we think is the first step toward spiritual mastery.
The sisters were glad to be together. They had the easy sort of relationship where they didn't have to speak to be understood.
The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe.
I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.
We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was before. Or so I tell myself; and for now that is enough.
Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.
If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.
Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it's just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
Bruce Springsteen's world is where everybody did these terrible jobs, if they had jobs at all, and he wanted something better.
'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
Greatness isn't something you should always be chasing. There's greatness within all of us, and I think that's what we forget.