Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers.
We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.
Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.
I'm sick of doing bad things and liking it and then wondering what's wrong with me. I want it to be over. I want to start again.
You don't have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can't you see how stupid that is?
But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.
I never realized that the blue sky I saw was not the soft, nurturing sky of spring, but the cold, chilling, lonely sky of winter
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.
Let's look on the bright side: we're having an adventure, Fezzik, and most people live and die without being as lucky as we are.
it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
I have no idea what the mind of a lowlife scoundrel is like, but I know what the mind of an honest man is like; it is terrifying.
... it's always interesting when one doesn't see. If you don't see what a thing means, you must be looking at it wrong way round.
In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.
I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.
Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.
Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.
The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.
Irvine, being a planned community, is really good shorthand, especially in a movie or book, for understanding suburban pressures.
Because teenagers don't have adult responsibilities yet, you can create your own drama, and it's a universe of your own emotions.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
Forgetfulness is not to be purchased with a wish; and I cannot bestow my esteem on all who desire it, unless they deserve it too.
The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.
The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.
What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.
Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.
Men tell us we are womanly when we love but once. Men! They have told us a lot of things to make life comfortable for themselves.
If we talk about the glass being half empty or half full, I want to know what does the glass look like from underneath the table?
Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.
There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.