Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.
..."And then we played Ping-Pong—” “Not pool? I always assumed he was a billiards man—I mean, it’s so handy the way he keeps a stick up his—
Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try.
In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world.
I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.
I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.
you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.
My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant.
Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?.... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.
Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is.
You don't need to show off your body to catch a boy's eye. You'd best learn that early on, or you'll be bringing home the worst sort of boy.
I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.
I don't type my sentences on an arena's pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans - I don't feel pressure to please a crowd.
To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.
THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is beautifully written, perfectly paced, expertly structured, and simply unputdownable. Koryta is an absolute master.
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.
I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.
never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.
There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.
My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.
If thou be industrious to procure wealth, be generous in the disposal of it. Man never is so happy as when he giveth happiness unto another.
More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.
There is no policy like politeness; and a good manner is the best thing in the world either to get a good name, or to supply the want of it.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.
Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.
It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth
I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.
But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.
The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.
In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.
I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.
... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
The choice is yours, brother. Live a thrall or die a king. Do you dare to fly? Unless you take the leap, you’ll never know." - Euron Greyjoy