Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.
We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.
I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus.
In the first few seconds an aching sadness wrenched his heart, but it soon gave way to a feeling of sweet disquiet, the excitement of gypsy wanderlust
Kids are super-independent. This is the time when you don't need your parents for a story anymore. You have a great degree of agency and independence.
You're very lucky... Friends are precious, powerful things - hard to earn, harder still to keep. You should thank this one for taking a chance on you.
I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
Woman at Point Zero I wrote during the '70s in Arabic. It came in English in '82. So, almost ten years' difference between the Arabic and the English.
Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men.
The Shift hasn't happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes-just enough times to give me hope-my brain jars back into where it's supposed to be.
Judas sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver; Faust sold his for some extra years of youth; Marilyn Monroe deserted Jesus Christ for Arthur Miller.
Anna Campbell and I have already done a history tour of parts of the U.K., and it would be fun to invite my fellow Word Wench Cara Elliott along, too!
It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance.
In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.
When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being "Homo sapiens" was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.
No! No! Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: Death does not exist.'
The beginning of mindful eating is the realization that eating meat is not about the meat-eater; it is about the animals who are tormented and killed.
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.
Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.
When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.
Praise has different effects, according to the mind it meets with; it makes a wise man modest, but a fool more arrogant, turning his weak brain giddy.
A sentence well couched takes both the sense and understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom.
I can detach myself from the world. If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment I have yet to hear of it.
He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years, or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.
To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.
Never trust a mechanic who drives new cars. They're either charging too much money for their work, or they can't keep an old car running - maybe both.
Just as I’ve always known there are monsters in the world, monsters and things even more evil, I’ve always known that it is God who keeps evil at bay.
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
How about this?' Simmon asked me. "Which is worse, stealing a pie or killing Ambrose?" I gave it a moment's hard thought. "A meat pie, or a fruit pie?
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.
In war, discipline is superior to strength; but if that discipline is neglected there is no longer any difference between the soldier and the peasant.
If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.
They came out in a dim, damp basement - a generic sort of place, full of moulding boxes. 'You take me to the nicest places,' Claire said, and sneezed.
I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future.
When you put a big budget into a film, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be a better picture, but it does help in creating new images on the screen.
I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.
When the status and power of women is greater so also is the nation’s general quality of life; when they are lower, so is the quality of life for all.
The married state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of heaven and hell we are capable of receiving in this life.