Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always been melancholic. At a party, everyone would be looking at the glittering chandeliers and I'd be looking at the waitress's cracked shoes.
Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.
I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.
It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.
Depression is a horrible, potentially life-threatening illness - but the lives it threatens are almost always those of the people who suffer from it.
We Americans are tempted to distinguish ourselves from other current and former inhabitants of this planet by assuming that we are ruled by progress.
I'm quite happy trekking around Greenland on my own, but those big book tours in America or the Far East are the only time I ever really feel lonely.
I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.
The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.
What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!
The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.
I don't know that I've ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.
She was sleeping in a quiet bedroom beside her brother, separated only by glass and sand from the young man she loved, a young man who loved her back
It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right.
A word of advice. If, as a young man, student, you are tormented by a desire for women, it is best to get out into the fresh air as much as possible.
I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.
It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.
On my travels I, at least, did not see Serbia as a land of paranoiacs - much more as the huge room of an orphaned, yes, an orphaned, abandoned child.
Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.
We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.
The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.
The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar.
I think of the author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, 'I will tell you a story' and then he passes the hat.
In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.
If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.
For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.
I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.
Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.
Sure my love is all crostLike a bud in the frostAnd there's no use at all in my going to bed,For 't is dhrames and not slape that comes into my head!
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.
.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.