Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
A lot of authors, judging by their list, will put anything out that they finish... That's the worst model I've heard of in my life. It's just idiotic. Why wouldn't you just wait for the good ones?
Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.
Morality is the least of my concerns. To me, morality in a society that - however moral its pose - is hierarchically organized is simply a lie, an alibi for the inequalities that exist in society.
Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.
My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years.
I am totally convinced that most grown-ups have completely forgotten what is it like to be a child between the ages of five and then... I can remember exactly what it was like. I am certain I can.
Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!
I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.
It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing.
I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.
Here, like everywhere else, laughing and singing, dancing and dreaming are not exactly the whole of reality; and for one ray of sun shining on the hut, the rest of the village remains in the dark.
Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.
"Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly." "I want to be a soldier. A hero." "You'll grow out of it."
His breath in my ear, he ran his tongue along the curved edge, sucking the fleshy lobe and my small diamond stud into his mouth, and my eyes drifted closed while I babbled a weak sound of longing.
Mining is a dangerous profession. There's no way to make a mine completely safe: These are the words owners have always used to excuse needless deaths and the words miners use to prepare for them.
When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.
Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
I dream of a quiet man / who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows / where the rarest wildflowers / are blooming, and who goes, / and finds that he is smiling / not by his own will.
A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.
Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex?
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.
You just came wild and sexy all over my hand and even left some claw marks on my back to prove it. Don’t go getting shy on me now. ‘Cause baby, before the night is over you will be naked in my bed.
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...
I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, 'More than you know.'
Actually, voting in countries like Indonesia is unpatriotic, as it only legitimizes the regime, which serves foreign political and economic interests, as well as those totally prostituted 'elites'.
Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.
Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.
I do like a little romance... just a sniff, as I call it, of the rocks and valleys. Of course, bread-and-cheese is the real thing. The rocks and valleys are no good at all, if you haven't got that.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
We can know what love is. It´s adults who have forgotten, so they cling to their poor substitute and yell at kids who dare to live with real love. Pure Love. Love without compromise or distraction.
Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you'll react into the opposite one, and he's got you.
Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says; we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.