Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The greatest and most amiable privilege which the rich enjoy over the poor is that which they exercise the least--the privilege of making others happy.
A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.
An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.
You can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn't do it when your uncle George was living much less when he's dead.
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)
We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.
That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.
You are such a chicken. Bock. Bock. Bock." He refused to allow her very bad chicken impression to ruffle his feathers. He was above petty name-calling.
Freed from the pressure of haste, the tyranny of film, and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself looking more closely at what went on around me.
There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.
I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.'
Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?
It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.
I can look back at my own life and see where a few words of praise have sharply changed my entire future. Can't you say the same thing about your life?
I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.
There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.
One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.
There are always those who would put on armour and go into battle. but the real genius is in finding a way to get what you desire without dying for it.
My father used to say, 'If you want to know the artist, look at the art'. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.
At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.
For those who are intrigued by the multiplicity of reality and the unique possibilities of their own vision, the creative is the path they must pursue.
But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them
The only thing I learned from the architecture is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place.
I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.
It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.
It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.
Life in community is no less than a necessity for us, an inescapable ‘must’all life created by God exists in communal order and works toward community.
You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.
If you have health, you probably will be happy, and if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want.
I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.
Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you're living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.
It turns out umpires and judges are not robots or traffic cameras, inertly monitoring deviations from a fixed zone of the permissible. They are humans.
Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.
The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson..... have taught man to look within himself to find God.
Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.
The life of prayer is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. It is like a garden which grows everything, from alpines to potatoes.
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.
To me, the success of the cyberactivists in Tunisia is actually very interesting, because many of them explicitly rejected any support from Washington.
The ethnic differences among Filipinos are very real. The paucity of arable land, for instance, explains the industry of the Ilokanos and the Cebuanos.
There ain't any news in being good. You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.