Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of the first observations to make in conversation is the state, or the character, and the education of the person to whom we speak.
Speak up, stand up, and keep correcting the false perceptions. Stay true to your heart's views and keep chanting for peace and justice.
I want to sympathize, I do, but the love triangle is just too delicious. The determined rock star and the possessive billionaire. Rawr.
When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
If we just allowed women and men more leeway in our culture and more acceptance, I think they would be able to make better compromises.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.
Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.
So this bloke says to me, "Can I come in your house and talk about your carpets?" I thought "That's all I need, a Je-hoover's witness".
All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
School is supposed to civilise us, to tame our wilder instincts and teach us how to be more sensible, more knowledgeable, and cleverer.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.
We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.
Whether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.
I've often been accused of dressing too well. I've always been fascinated by fashion, though I don't think I'm particularly fashionable.
Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.
Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.
The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. There is no sense that anything needs to change, but it does change.
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
To change your mind under the direction of the wisdom of the heart is a brush stroke on the masterpiece you are delivering to the world.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.
It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.
The child is small, and he includes the man; the brain is narrow, and it harbours thought; the eye is but a point, and it covers leagues
The world can only be redeemed through action--movement--motion. Uncoerced, unbribed, and unbought, humanity will move toward the light.
He had been my almost. My might-have-been. I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.
There's Beatles books and T-shirts and rings, and one thing and another. To buy my daughter all these things, I had to sell her brother.
It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.