Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused.
Last night I'd made love to a woman for the first and last time. It had been amazing and I had a memory that would shape the rest of my life.
Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Joy is at its keenest when contrasted with sorrow, courage at its height when it follows fear, faith at its noblest when it grows from doubt.
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 was born in Rocky Mount, NC. The town of 24,000 proved a great place to spend the first 17 years of life. But, after that, onward, outward.
Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.
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.
I love the idea that magic and witchcraft and battles between supernatural creatures could be raging all around us but just out of our sight.
I believe that, by and large, people are good and everybody you meet is more likely to surprise you in a positive way than in a negative way.
He looked from the phone to the unconscious figure of the Salesman. "What did you do to him?" he asked. "He got the wrong number," Alex said.
He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited.
Things to be done offer themselves, I suppose, because they are in themselves desirable; not because it is desirable to have something to do.
A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else.
Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head.
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.
I've loved thrillers and spy stories since I was a kid. It's probably not a bad rule of thumb to write the kinds of stories you love to read.
I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It's a myth. There's so much bad gun stuff.
In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.
He had not yet learned that the only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires.
I played Little League for one year. That was it. Then my mother realized I liked books and threatened my father. I owe her forever for that.
I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.
The fact that there are bigger injustices and wrongs doesn't make it right to sacrifice an innocent monkey. It doesn't alter the case at all.
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.
As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.
It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say.
Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.
An isolated outbreak of virginity is a rash on the face of society. It arouses only pity from the married, and embarrassment from the single.
Refinement is just as much a Christian grace in a man as in a woman; but he is not such a hateful, unsexed creature without it as a woman is.
Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.
My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.
The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.