Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.
If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.
I'm not sure that love and like aren't like cats and dogs: One can't grow up to be the other, but they can be taught to live under the same roof.
Sex Ed - when I finally got to take it - was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people.
Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.
Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.
As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it.
In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.
I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours.
iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.
If my idea was just to maintain a certain lifestyle, there would be no need to get a Ph.D. But I do care very deeply about the idea side as well.
If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516
...there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality.
Unexpected doors fly open, unexpected channels are free, and endless avalanches of abundance are poured out upon me, under grace in perfect ways.
How comes it that you curse, Frere Jean? It's only, said the monk, in order to embellish my language. They are the colors of Ciceronian rhetoric.
I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.
I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.
There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords; there are words the point of which sting the heart through the course of a whole life.
Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.
The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally.
Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life - if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.
There's parts of Sydney totally indistinguishable from West London. It's exactly the same - the sense of capitulation, discouraging assimilation.
I know that all the magic kisses in the world probably couldn't have helped him today. But I would do anything to have been able to give him one.
Or maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.
For 'Boxers and Saints', the tension between Eastern and Western ways of thinking was very personal for me, and I needed to control every aspect.
If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.
To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.
Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.
We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.
Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.
As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.
We have control over the work of our hands, but little over the working of the soul. But yet we must yield to it, for without it we have nothing.
One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
There are 13 stories in 'The Fencepost Chronicles' about corrupt tribal leaders, trouble on the reserve, survival schemes, and communal drinking.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.