Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.
It's about me, or people wouldn't be so anxious to keep me from knowing about it. The absence of information is information. ~ Ender
Most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan.
Beautifully drawn, solid, compelling characters against a background so real and scary I left the lights on all night. It was great!
I was a commercial roofer before this, until about age thirty. I will not work others under me and do not want to work under others.
I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.
I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.
The bigger the budget, the less an audience is trusted, and that's the difference between a big-budget film and a small-budget film.
Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders
For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
Our responsibility to ourselves comes first -- because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!
For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.
Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.
Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.
Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.
It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.
The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
If reality is as equally valuable as fiction, then you should just chalk up the parts of the past you don’t need to your imagination
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.
Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
I don't go online when I'm writing - that's the devil's workshop - but in general, I'm on there as much as any other global citizen.
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.
While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.
The Doors formed on the beaches of Los Angeles, in what you might imagine is the tradition of local rock bands since the Beach Boys.
There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.
Yes - I am usually overweight. I have had to be interested in diet because of being diabetic for 30 years and having kidney failure.
I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure.' It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.
All sorts of creative communities are withering in New York because it's too hard to live here. It's ridiculous how expensive it is.
I saw myself as a writer, a novelist, even though I was living the life of a mother and housewife. Writing was - and is - what I do.
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.
Forgive me, Your Grace. Are you suggesting a woman is some sort of … piece of fruit to you? One squeeze, and you know if she’s ripe?
The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?
This is what it means to be in the middle of love, I thought. Being in the middle of love is like being in the middle of a war zone.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era.
I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.
Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.