Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.
I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.
The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?
I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.
All of the people of my time were bound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn. They had forgotten the west winds.
I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.
What a writer's message is is totally unimportant. Either he is agreeing with life by affirming, or he is saying life is just a bowl of wormwood.
I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.
My sister was the one who told me where babies come from. My sister was also the one who laughed when I immediately asked her where babies go to.
Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details.
Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century.
The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
It seems like I'm not [happy]. Because if you look at my tweets and what I think and say, it seems like I'm worried about what's going to happen.
I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.
And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.
I was one of the first generations to watch television. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad?
Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.
I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
It's not often real that you encounter the real person behind a good-natured mask, the darkest part of someone. It's not comfortable what you do.
A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
Fezzik's in trouble, bubble bubble, His brain is just not in the pink, His mind is rubble, rub-a-dub double, Because everyone needs him to think.
The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.
I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.
Surrender your expectations. Surrender your doubts. Surrender your fears. Surrender your strengths. Surrender your anger. Surrender your control.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
First you find a little thread, a little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope. And from the rope you hang by the neck.
As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.
Even if I had stayed she wouldn't have ever wanted me. She didn't want me for anything more than a summer fling. I was a way of moving on for her.
Why couldn't I have just made it home without seeing them? I wasn't in the mood to play good freaking Samaritan to Beau and his trashy girlfriend.
I understood that pain was real and sometimes things didn't last. Sometimes you just had to enjoy it while it lasts and cherish it when it's gone.
I find auditioning to be a very illusive process, where actors come in with this really big result with no process, so it's a lie already at work.
Shoemakers and tanners form a symbiotic relationship out of necessity. One provides the leather while the other whips it into a glorious creation.
All the higher forms of life have evolved from some one's ideal of justice, liberty or beauty; and the belief that nothing is too good to be true.
My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances
The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.
I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.
What did you see?' he asked then. Nothing,' I told him. 'Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.
China is one of the greatest cultures on Earth, and it is one of those countries that suffered immensely from colonialist horrors and humiliation.
Farewell to Thee! But not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of Thee; Within my heart they still shall dwell And they shall cheer and comfort me.
Keep guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlets, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness.
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.