Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.
Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.
Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
To be free comes not from changing or fixing this world, but from seeing this world as it is and opening the heart in the midst of it.
Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both.
Without discontentment, without revolt, you can never attain harmony. It is a necessary stage, which must be gone through by everyone.
Everyone must go through all experiences but they need not go through them all in reality -they can do it vicariously, by imagination.
I can't imagine the scientists wanting me to walk into the lab and start fiddling around with some big bowl of electrons they had out.
I get very weird and defensive about what I'm working on - I wouldn't even tell my secretary what the next page of my novel was about.
People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.
There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.
If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.
Yes, my love, who soever lives, loses, . . . but he also wins. [Ger., Ja, meine Liebe, wer lebt, verliebt . . . aber er gewinnt auch.]
Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.
This wasn't the way he had expected his life to be. It worked, but that was about all. Happiness had got lost somewhere along the way.
It is possible to learn all about the mysteries of the Bible and never be affected by it in one's soul. Great knowledge is not enough.
For to speak the truth, there are but few that care thus to spend their time, but choose rather to be speaking of things to no profit.
Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.
Breathes there a man, whose judgment clear Can others teach their course to steer, Yet run himself life's mad career Wild as the wave?
I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.
I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.
Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone
Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.
I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.
What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.
The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.
You have to be like the pebble in the stream, keeping the grain and rolling along without being dissolved or dissolving anything else.
The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.
You can think whatever you want, say whatever you want, and do whatever you want, as long as you are willing to face the consequences.
He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn't see any sense in mixing whiskey with water since the whiskey was already wet.
but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.
She shrugged another plump shoulder. “I never listened to Porter when he got going.” Ah. At last. The secret to a successful marriage.
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
I won't be going to any New Year's Eve parties because I think they're naff. No one over the age of 15 should bother going to parties.
Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth... suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.
If a man has to say trust me, Gogu conveyed, it's a sure sign you cannot. Trust him, that is. Trust is a thing you know without words.
It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.
My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.
I didn't want to choose one world. I wanted to be part of both. I didn't want to see only one side of the sky. I wanted to see it all.
The beginning of a book is always the hardest part for me. I'm a Chapter 3 kind of writer, which means I naturally start at Chapter 3.
I think sometimes that people are like onions. On the outside smooth and whole and simple but inside ring upon ring, complex and deep.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.
I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.
Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.