Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People forget that in the early '70s, Saturday was the most-watched night of television of the week. It was where you found 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'All in the Family.'
...I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it
[On the United States:] We are a wildly energetic people in our pursuit of pleasure, let alone in our pursuit of money, and we are very odd to look at as we go about our lives.
The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.
Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.
Why, I can't help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them. I know I'm no better than the rest of the world; but I can't help it if I'm pleasanter. It's constitutional.
Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back to sanity.
The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale.
My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don't really want children. Now I'm glad I don't have them. Part of that is because I have my books.
I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.
Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?
It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.
The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.
Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.
But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose.
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter lingering chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.
National consciousness is truly a miraculous thing. When I am not in Turkey I feel even more Turkish than in Istanbul. But when I'm home my European side becomes more apparent.
I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.
I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.
Everybody is damaged goods. Everybody got bumps and dents, ja? But sometimes two people fit together, and the bumps go into the dents, and you have a whole thing like a potato.
I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into both Denmark and Sweden. I don't think about it, of course, when I am writing.
We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow whiny bowling pins.
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!
Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
Conquest, tyranny, treachery, and the clash of cultures bring about corrupt societies, and so does old age. Sometimes the five faces of corruption are visible at the same time.
Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous that will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come.
A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.
I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.
I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?
Simple people have much to offer. We too in return must give to them to the best of our abilities. We must with all our heart, try to help them acquire what they truly deserve.
I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
In 1976, divorce could still raise eyebrows, as could a woman's decision not to have children. Dyslexia wasn't as commonly recognized then, and thus not treated as it is today.
As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.
Beware how you contradict prejudices, even knowing them to be such, for the generality of people are much more tenacious of their prejudices than of anything belonging to them.
Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.
I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
Because my name is Hungarian, everyone assumed I knew about Hungary. I didn't. They also assumed that if you knew about Hungary, you also knew about the rest of Eastern Europe.