Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
Then, early, early, early in the morning-just as in countless Disney films-I heard a rooster crow. But guess what? They don't do it just once.
How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.
We have our arts, the ancients had theirs... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.
The right of commanding is no longer an advantage transmitted by nature; like an inheritance, it is the fruit of labors, the price of courage.
Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.
I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I'll be happy.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.
A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger's end.
People can't see your root system, but God can. Praying and meditating on the Word of God will cause your roots to go down deep into His love.
I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
It is practically certain that sometime during 1958, either the Russians or we, and most likely both, are going to shoot a rocket to the moon.
The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.
I think every morning we wake up offers a new beginning, a new way of stepping into the day. I think every conversation could be a new chance.
The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.
I don't know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?
Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside. It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant.
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.
Politicians want people to be nice neighbours, but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.
The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses . . . Each generation . . . will have its creed.
Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.
That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.
Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen.
Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.
Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Dream of me, my beloved family, happy in my plundering and adventuring, for when the waves rock me to sleep tonight, I will be dreaming of you.
I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.
Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.
Wherever I go in the world, people all know about Scotland Street and are always asking me about what's going to happen to the characters next.
...know you not that you are my sun by day, and my star by night? By my faith! I was in deepest darkness till you appeared and illuminated all.
You who weep for pleasures fled, While dragging on a life of care, All your woes will melt in air, If to god your tears are shed, You who Weap!
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.
A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,--by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,--becomes the genius that rules the rest of life.