Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.
If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.
I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.
You cannot be completely nice. It's impossible. Who is it? Who is the perfect guy? Show him to me! It doesn't exist. And thank god.
Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.
Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.
Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.
And at the start of every new day, I still believed I could choose my own beginning, one that was scrubbed clean of everything past
Happiness is like a butterfly - the more you chase, the more subtle, but if you stop moving and quietly wait for it to land on you.
It’s the same thing. Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed.
She was everything I wanted. She was beautiful and charming, with a quick sense of humor, and she supported me in everything I did.
Even if I thought he as perfect for her." She turned to face him. "What were we thinking?" "We weren't," he said. "We were in love.
Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
Aromatic plants bestow no spicy fragrance while they grow; but crush'd or trodden to the ground, diffuse their balmy sweets around.
It has been well observed that few are better qualified to give others advice than those who have taken the least of it themselves.
Alas! the joys that fortune brings Are trifling, and decay, And those who prize the trifling things, More trifling still than they.
And what is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth or fame, And leaves the wretch to weep?
I can't say whether we had more wit among us now than usual, but I am certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well.
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.
When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself.
I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.
An artist is a person who thinks more than there is to think, feels more than there is to feel, and sees more than there is to see.
I can't stop terrorism; I can't cure cancer. But I can put some stories out there in their own quiet way that talk about tolerance.
You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.
What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
I'd like to think they're staring at me because of my white-hot animal magnetism, but I'm not Elvis. I'm Lobster Boy, hear me roar.
Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?
If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.
Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics, especially if you're there for a long time.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.
There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.
Tintin comics evoke Bermuda, where my parents doled out comics for good behavior and my grandmother taught me how to shuffle cards.
In today's US, it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.