Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.
When you have done the rashest thing in the world it is very pleasant to be told that no man of spirit could have acted otherwise.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.
And the needles of the pine trees, freshly washed to a deep, rich green, shimmered with droplets that blinked like clear crystals.
Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.
no matter how big you think your problems are, someone else's problems could always be bigger, which makes yours relatively small!
I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good...Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments).
Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.
Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.
I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.
Wise people say it is folly to think anybody perfect; and as to likes and dislikes, we should be friendly to all, and worship none
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.
Whatever my powers--feminine or the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.
He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. 'Oh, Jane! my hope - my love - my life!' broke in anguish from his lips.
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
The frustration for a parent is that you might be available all the time, but the kid may approach you only about 10% of the time.
No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.
I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.
I usually write in my kitchen, which is a large, octagonal room that looks into woods - three big windows look out into the trees.
even though the dead are beyond our touch, they remain fully dimensional, fully capable of affecting our decisions and quandaries.
Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.
He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.
If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.