Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.
If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.
There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
With passions stilled and one's nature firm, all destinies are in harmony; When the full moon of contemplation is reached you will be pure.
I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.
People are like almanacs, Bonnie - you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
Or maybe I’d lost my soul already. I doubted God let someone like me keep any gift from him. It was highly likely I’d been born without one.
I don't know if that's a year's bad luck, or if that's how it works. But stealing a Christmas tree - that can't be a good thing, karma-wise.
Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.
As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.
One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.
Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.
Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end.
Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.
I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing
I'll no doubt just continue stumbling and bumbling through life, putting myself in precarious places, rising sadder if not wiser, as always.
There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved
Indonesian people have no idea whom they are actually voting for, or of what their political system consists of. It is so easy to fool them.
I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
As an adult, I took ballet classes three times a week, and I believed it gave me better posture, a stronger body, and made me more graceful.
My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.
Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.
Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
What if a puppet could cut its own strings, and in that act of defiance and strength of will become truly alive? Become is own puppetmaster?
But death does not stand at the end of life, it is all through it. It is the fear of losing, the knowledge of losing that makes love tender.
Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.
Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.
Completely committed to adapting 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.
His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.
If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?
As Im writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain--rigor and recklessness--simultaneously.
As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.
It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.
To the dear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break... I am ever tender and true.
That the women of the Old Testament were dressed with oriental richness there is no doubt, nor are they censured for so arraying themselves.