Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm curious how people build up the codes that they live their life by, and how they come to think that that's the best way for them to function.
I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
There is no such thing as romance in our day, women have become too brilliant; nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.
Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
That is the freakiest thing that ever happened to me.” I nodded toward the mess. “And if you knew my life, you’d realize just how freaky that is.
suicide can be used as a very cruel weapon, you know. It can be the ultimate revenge, leaving a scar that a living person may carry to the grave.
The cost of a loaf is a simple thing, and so a loaf is often sought, but some things are past valuing: laughter, land, and love are never bought.
And if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that cool props and special effects are not enough. Story comes first. Everything depends on story.
I taught you to take the first step: to learn to believe in belief. And one day you will take the second step and find what is it you believe in.
Substance must emanate from spirit and is nothing else than the record of the spirit's conception of itself finding expression in space and time.
If we know that we are now at the point where we have always wanted to be, we will be there. . . because we are never there but always here, now!
Every profession has its own culture, but the police look at the world differently to everybody else. I call it a 'healthy culture of suspicion'.
We've got rights the right to starve We've got jobs waiting for work We're all brothers lousy and dirty We're all free and equal to die like dogs
I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.
Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.
Any church may have a mighty man of God for its pastor, if it is willing to pay the price, and that price is not a big salary, but great praying.
He had on a funny T-shirt, as usual. Today's featured acartoon figure running from a giant T. rex, and it read EXERCISE: SOME MOTIVATIONREQUIRED.
You okay?" he asked me. I nodded, unable to say anything that would really cover how I felt. "Then get out of the way." "Huh?" "Your legs. Please
Oliver: You turned me down. So why, I wonder, did you decide Amelie would be a better choice? Claire: She smells better. And she made me cookies.
I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging.
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
"That's sad," said Montag, quietly, "because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know."
Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.
Without exception, every person who has a great life used love to achieve it. The power to have all the positive and good things in life is love.
Perspective - Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that.
I have always wanted an adventurous life. It took a long time to realize that I was the only one who could make an adventurous life happen to me.
Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves.
One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.
We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can.
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
Help me always to speak the truth quietly, to listen with an open mind when others speak, and to remember the peace that may be found in silence.
We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.
By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.
I believe that we have the ability to change our lives using our imaginations. Imagination is a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
It's much more effective to allow solutions to problems to emerge from the people close to the problem rather than to impose them from higher up.
My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto.
Confidence is not based on you having all the resources needed to take care of yourself; confidence is based upon the truth that God is faithful.