Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.
Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.
The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet. They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes.
Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.
the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
You must try never to regret what might have been, child. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot yet see.
Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.
What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?
HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.
You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.
He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.
College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.
All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.
Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.
Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.
Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Splendid,' Abbé Patin said with a sheepish grin, pulling up alongside. 'There is nothing quite so thrilling as riding in fear of one's life.
If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.
Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.
I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.
In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
If the advice is simply to respect yourself and follow the path that you want to follow, that would be the best advice I could ever pass on.
A celebration of insignificance, Is that all we are in the end? And one day I’ll just be one more of those faces, frozen in death and wonder
Innocence as we understand it in our culture is very theatrical. The flip side is, if youre charming enough, you can get away with anything.
We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.
I was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it.
One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction
The Blushing Pansy," his cousin read aloud, in a tone of abject horror. "Tea shop and confectionery." Bram swore. This was going to be ugly.
At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
Just because someone has gone to an elite school and college does not make him smarter than the person who has grown up on street knowledge.
I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.
Lawyers are like that famous vampire-bat, said to exist in Hungary, which seizes on a creature, and never lets go while there is blood left.
God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?
A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.
Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.
At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.
Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.