Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
What was even more germane was my study of the history of religion. It was one of the few things in school I was fascinated by.
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.
A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity.
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.
I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.
... love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love is then the greater the fear is.
But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.
What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!
I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.
yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism
If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.
People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.
When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
Twitter is amazing. I advertised for the position of research assistant on Twitter, and both of my researchers came from there.
When the precipitancy of a man's wishes hurries on his ideas ninety times faster than the vehicle he rides in--woe be to truth!
Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.
Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.
To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.
If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.
Hope is a path on the mountainside. At first there is no path. But then there are people passing that way. And there is a path.
When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
I think a Christian definition of the mind should be: an openness to whatever the individual and collective mind reveals to us.
No. She will never be queen.” She swayed toward him, and he felt like he was being encircled by a python, smothered and choked.
If you honestly believe that," said Thorne, stowing the gun again, "then you really don't recognize true value when you see it.
I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.
Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.
I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.
It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way.
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
Autumn is full of leave-taking. In September the swallows are chattering of destination and departure like a crowd of tourists.
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.