Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm the kind of person who would have liked to have lived at the Plaza. I love crystal chandeliers and gold leaf, velvets and mirrors, Oriental rugs and marble.
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I'm made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living.
What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?
We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.
In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest-without asking to be paid.
I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end.
I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.
Parents spend a lot of time talking over kids. My son went through a vocabulary burst as I was writing The Bear. I thought, What if I just stopped and listened?
Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.
If you can get sexual attention and then (or therefore) succeed as a writer - or [fill in career blank] - that means you're a writer worthy of literary respect?
The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water.
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.
Being a soldier [in the wars of modern power politics] was like being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players' own parents and friends.
Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?
Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. “Don't tempt me,” he murmured.
You can learn to find unknowns in equations, draw equidistant lines and demonstrate theorems, but in real life there's nothing to position, calculate, or guess.
Personally, its a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.
Everything in the least connected with him has value for me; if someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me-and I long to mention it myself
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.
No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.
Great Spirit, When we face the sunset when we come singing the last song, may it be without shame, singing 'it is finished in beauty, it is finished in beauty!'
I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.
Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.
He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.
She decided that her wisest course would be to put him out of her mind. After reaching this conclusion she lay thinking about him until at last she fell asleep.
Has no one ever told you that it is the height of impropriety to kiss any gentleman, unless you have the intention of accompanying him immediately to the altar?
The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.
All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.
Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch.
We must all die. There's nothing terrible about death. But to live on after death, a soul, earthbound, a vampire--you don't wish any such fate for your beloved.