Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.
There is no knowledge for which so great a price is paid as a knowledge of the world; and no one ever became an adept in it except at the expense of a hardened or a wounded heart.
Patriotism is understood to be that virtue which consists in serving one's country; but in what way is this 'Patria' or country served by slaying its able bodied men in thousands?
I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.
I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.
I am strangely addicted to the writing of long letters, which, I am afraid, tire you; and for the future, I believe, I must be less communicative, in order to be less troublesome.
The careful rearer of the ductile human plant can instil his own religion, and surround the soul by such a moral atmosphere, as shall become to its latest day the air it breathes.
I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.
Now you are no longer a giggling child, smiling at whoever comes along. You are a woman with power. Learn to control your smile, and you can control what men will think about you.
With each book, you get better as a writer. There is no back door to the industry. Read in the genre you want to write, as the more you read, the better you will get as an author.
He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.
No matter how wild the winds or rough the seas of life, libraries stand ready, beaming their reliable lights, guiding us toward knowledge, pleasure, consolation, wisdom, and hope.
As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.
There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.
And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.
I've been burdened by questions I've asked myself a thousand times since the last time we were together. Why did I do it? And would I do it again? It was I, you see, who ended it.
Noah Calhoun watched the fading sun sink lower from the wrap around porch of his plantation-style home.He liked to sit here in the evenings, especially after working hard all day.
[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?
I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
What if in Scotland's wilds we viel'd our head, Where tempests whistle round the sordid bed; Where the rug's two-fold use we might display, By night a blanket, and a plaid by day.
And as a bird each fond endearment tries To tempt its new-fledg'd offspring to the skies, He tried each art, reprov'd each dull delay, Allur'd to brighter worlds, and led the way.
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.
More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don't know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in.
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country
Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
I was a slave to something he believed to be silly and superstitious: the idea that all life was worth defending and that nothing justified surrender to the forces of destruction.
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.
The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.
Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won't. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can't eat meat until you've killed it.
France and America have a long history of mutual loathing and longing. Americans still dream of Paris; Parisians still dream of the America they find in the movies of David Lynch.
I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.
It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.
Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.' 'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.
Do you love me?" he asked. I fell silent. "For the rest of it is glitter and noise," he said. "At the heart of it all is love. You make that choice, and you go forward from there.
I'm embarrassed to reveal that I never went to CBGB's in the '80s. I was never cool enough to be a punk, and I wouldn't have had the stamina, or the discipline, for straight-edge.
Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.
Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy
I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
They [my stories] evolve. If they're tightly constructed, it's because they're revised constantly as I move forward each day. That's where the structure inheres. It's all organic.
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.