Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind!
In the United States, there is no project so audacious for which people cannot be found to guarantee the cost and find the working expenses.
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.
Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it's going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.
There is not a greater paradox in nature,--than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.
After all, the only thing that is going to save mankind is if enough people live their lives for something or someone other than themselves.
Great writers zealously learn the craft of their profession so they can release the power and the depth of their imagination and experience.
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.
Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.
The small hopes and plans and pleasures of children should be tenderly respected by grown-up people, and never rudely thwarted or ridiculed.
If men refuse to be kindled, sparks can only burn themselves out, just as paper images and carriages burn out on the street during funerals.
Do not feel badly if your kindness is rewarded with ingratitude; it is better to fall from your dream clouds than from a third-story window.
A beautiful woman without fixed principles may be likened to those fair but rootless flowers which float in streams, driven by every breeze.
Mad About You fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.
I know what it's like to feel snobby; I know what it's like to feel anxiety; I know what it's like to feel like busted because you're crazy.
Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's
High trees cast long shadows. The happier and more blessed a woman's life is, the more duz she feel for them that are less blessed than she.
I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.
It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.
Because homophobia is still largely driven by the church, it's legitimised. It's also tied to sexism, because those two are never far apart.
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.
The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.
My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.
What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.
The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.
The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.
Would you stop thinking about what everyone wants. Stop thinking about what I want, what he wants, what your parents want. What do you want?
Because publishing is becoming more business-oriented each day with more examination of the bottom line, it's harder to break out than ever.
Dear John, tell me everything. Write it all down, that way, we’ll be with each other all the time, even if we’re not with each other at all.
How're the Broncos doing?" "Like a bunch of carrots." "Is that bad?" "Can carrots play baseball?" "I guess not." "Then you have your answer.
gettimg attached to things is pointless. Thats how things get screwed up.People care to much about everything. Let it go. You'll be happier.
To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
True genius walks along a line, and, perhaps, our greatest pleasure is in seeing it so often near falling, without being ever actually down.
That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.
He could see Bonzo's anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender's anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo's was hot, and so it used him.
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.
What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?