Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.
We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again." ~Fiddler, pg. 558
I always write back to people who are kind enough to write to me. Actually, I don't write - I recline on my red velvet sofa with my feet on the coffee table and dictate the letters to my eldest son.
... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.
Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature.
A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.
And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.
"But please, when you see an opportunity..." He presses his hand to my cheek, cold and strong, and tilts my head up so I have to look at him. His eyes glint. They almost look predatory. "Ruin them."
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
After the strike, I lost interest. In reality, neither players nor owners care in the least about the fans. The greed of both factions has destroyed baseball's credibility, at least for the present.
What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous.
When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.
But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' that was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself.
I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working
Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
Suddenly they were dancing, holding each other tight, moving in circles that symbolised their relationship, both afraid to let go, both willing the song to continue while silently their insides tore.
I don't know what I'd do without you. There's no one else to look after me. And it's not just that. I sometimes think you're the only person who really knows me. I only feel normal when I'm with you.
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.
I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.
I came to know that in many ways it was a crime to be Filipino in California .... I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.
At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.
The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparisons of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.
Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style.
The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's fine.
When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality--same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.
They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.
Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we're desperately hanging onto, that we don't want to see further eroded.
I carried props into the subway - the latest 'Semlotext(e),' a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.
Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.
Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.
Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.
All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.