Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
swearing is, as I have said, learning to the ignorant, eloquence to the blockhead, vivacity to the stupid, and wit to the coxcomb.
She sealed his lips with a wanton kiss; 'Though I forgive your breaking your vows to heaven, I expect you to keep your vows to me.
At the heart of its strength is a weakness: a lone candle can hold it back. Love is more than a candle, love can ignite the stars.
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.
I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.
I’m a total atheist, and for me it’s just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living.
There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition.
Dean: If there is a greater power, why is it he can't get you a new sweater? Jamie: Because, he's too busy looking for your brain.
I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
Embosom'd in the deep where Holland lies. Methinks her patient sons before me stand, Where the broad ocean leans against the land.
Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.
Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.
I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.
My wife's a lot younger than me ... thirty years difference . . . You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you ... Never.
Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That's just a fact and it's regrettable and it's got to change.
I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.
A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.
You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.
Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
Im not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or let the characters speak through me, whatever that might mean.
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.
The Queen has been guillotined, accused of crimes beyond imagining. Last night she appeared to me in a dream, handing me her head.
There are programs for the scrapping of appliances, but no one thinks about what's involved in the waste management of brassieres.
I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.
If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.
When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.
Reading 'The Third Sex' feels a bit like flying in a veering helicopter over a rain forest that is disappearing before one's eyes.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.
And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born.
As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.