Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A title means marketing. It means that company's coming soon, and you'd better get out the Christmas lights so they don't miss your house.
I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!
We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that today is like yesterday, but he believes tomorrow will be different.
All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.
I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world.
But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?
You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could.
Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.
Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.
If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.
I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.
I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.
I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
Each book takes anywhere from two to three years to complete, from concept to outline to final edits. I work on as many as five at a time.
I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
The principles that will save Earth's life are the same principles that save the living souls of humans: ineluctable spiritual principles.
Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.
Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
My hand does the work and I dont have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. Its like a dam in the brain that bursts.
If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.
Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beausant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,-"Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost."
The world is a stone wall ... and they have put the stones so close together that there is not a single crack through which one may enter.
The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance,' and I have found his words true.
If you're not happy, if you're not Emmersonianly happy and think everything's going to get better, then you're just sort of a dark animal.
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.
I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.
It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.
It is our duty never to speak ill of others, you know; least of all when we know that to do so will be the cause of much pain and trouble.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave, I don't know.
To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and God the obstacles are so many!
... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.
I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.