Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Football really felt like a private thing when I was in my teens because it wasn't on television, for a start, apart from 'Match of the Day.'
While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured; to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.
Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.
Lies can be wonderful things, and when a lie is told artfully, if it's done with a degree of craftsmanship, I can't help but admire the liar.
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.
In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.
My mother, Carole Hedges, was my world until she walked out of our house when I was 7. Actually, she didn't walk out. Alcohol walked her out.
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.
Curiosity is the only thing that really carries through time, isn't it? The creative curiosity, I mean, which fights its way into expression?
A man whose every exertion is bent upon showing up the flaws in his wife's character must be at least partially responsible for some of them.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready
You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.
I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.
It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.
The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.
I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.
The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.
The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.
Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
And she looked at me like she couldn't believe I knew she loved Anne Rice. I guess he didn't know how much she talked or how much I listened.
Sam dropped me off. When she was too far away to see me, I started to cry again. Because she was my friend again. And that was enough for me.
I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.
Innocence as we understand it in our culture is very theatrical. The flip side is, if you're charming enough, you can get away with anything.
Writing chases after the senses, and conveys them in an altered form. When it is done well, the senses come alive in a new and captured form.
Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.
I try to be rational and suppress the hope that this is for real, but hope has a way of closing its eyes to reason and it just keeps growing.
I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.
When a group of ultra-opinionated, uber-creative romance authors get together, I'm sure you guys can imagine how fast the ideas start flying!
I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.
I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Fate is just another word for people's choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it. It inevitably lies in our hands.
It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.
I try to write 1,000 words a day - about three pages. When I reach 1,000 words I feel good. Less than that: a failure. More than that: tired.