Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Harold and Maude' was a seminal movie for me because it's not only a beautiful love story, but it's also about the moment when misfits find each other.
I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.
A lot of readers want characters to behave in a responsible way, or they want to understand the characters' dilemma and act, in a way, on their behalf.
I've been in perfect health and perfectly happy all my life. I don't take any pills; I just get up, clean up after my wife, and start typing every day.
Why would I want to read something about somebody that's just a really nice, decent person who overcomes terrible trials? That's not how life is to me.
They call it 'falling in love' because it's less like stepping and more like tripping. Tripping is the part where you're still trying to remain upright
A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
I had a wonderful and very successful career in New York and had the privilege of working with some of the best editors and publishers in the business.
To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love it is the one thing that solaces and delights.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.
America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
Even those with unspendable fortunes only have one mind, one mouth, two ears, two eyes and one pleasure station. There's only so much fun you can take.
Colleges typically did not tell you that ninety percent of your education came after you hung the parchment on the wall. People might ask for a rebate.
I started writing because I decided I was too old to play pretend in the backyard. Then I found that I could create those imaginary worlds on the page.
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
You don't want to be rude but you have to be careful - there are a lot of strange people out there. (Goldman attributes this quote to Cliff Robertson.)
I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.
People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.
Harriet, Hi! Light of my eye! Come to the pictures and have a good cry, For it's jolly old Saturday, Mad-as-a-hatter-day, Nothing-much-matter-day-night!
It's very inconvenient to be loved. Nearly everyone has found that out, sooner or later. The fewer people who love you the less you will have to suffer.
I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.
Generally, I think most of my writing tends to have some kind of magical element to it. That's the way I can access the emotional life of the character.
There is a case, and a strong case, for that particular form of indolence that allows us to move through life knowing only what immediately concerns us.
You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.
It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.
Donald Trump is horrendous, but he is also honest. Both Presidents [Bill] Clinton and [Barak] Obama were great speakers, but unrepentant mass murderers.
What 'Survivor' is really about is the inescapability of your being yourself, even when you have told yourself you can be someone different for 30 days.
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.
You tell anyone that I cried, and I'll cut your liver out." "Do you even know where a human liver resides?"[...] "Yes," she said, and punched him in it.
If you lust after someone and have an absurd and overwhelming need to protect them, then the best way to deal with the situation is to marry the person.
The school even had a Latin motto: Pergo et Perago, which sounded like the story of two Italian cannibals but which actually meant “I try and I achieve.
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.
"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment..."
To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.