Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)
Hair is what connects women in Dakar and Detroit, Oprah [Winfrey] and Opal [Tometi] the Black Lives Matter activist. There's a story in every kink, curl, and coil.
An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.
We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base
Before my commercial success, I had difficulty doing what I wanted, but my sincere short films always won prizes in festivals. So I was ready for larger successes.
Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They'll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.
It is a very wonderful experience indeed, when, at fifty years old, you suddenly discover that for the first time in your life, you are really free to be yourself.
If someone ensures us two square meals a day, we will sing and pray all our waking hours. If one has to hoe sugarcane all day, devotion to God vanishes like smoke.
Foreign journalists writing about Turkey like to focus on the most fundamental divide in Turkish society: the rift between religious conservatives and secularists.
Aska is going to create history and show the way to the entire country by sending a member of women SHG to Parliament and four women members to the state assembly.
I always start a book thinking that it can be something other than first-person present, and I always come back to first-person present. It's just the easiest way.
The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.
I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'
I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?
Anybody can sympathise with all the sufferings of the pal, nevertheless it involves an extremely great mother nature to sympathise by using a friend's achievement.
To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
I have a dining room done in different shades of white, with white cushions embroidered in yellow silk: the effect is absolutely delightful and the room beautiful.
I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.
It was neither preaching nor praying that made a better man of me, but one or two people who believed in me better than I deserved, and I hated to disappoint them.
Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Mercy," he said,"in a fair fight between near equals, I'll back you every time. It's the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I'm working on that.
Are your people uncomfortable during meetings and tired at the end? If not, they're probably not mixing it up enough and getting to the bottom of important issues.
we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.
With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.
If you talk to any cop, however hardened, and say, "Has anything that's ever bothered you", they'll tell you about the death of a child that they had to deal with.
I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding.
If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.
People have talents that are different. Where does the creative flow come from - inside us or from a higher power? I don't ask any questions. I just write it down.
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Who's Myrnin?" Claire controlled an urge to roll her eyes. "Badass crazy vampire scientist who's my boss." "You realize no part of that sentence made sense, right?
I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.
Our parents had Ph.D.s, but we were dirty ragamuffin children. I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.
I just like that balance of the real and the fantastical because as a reader and consumer of stories and fantasy, I always want to feel like I can find that world.
In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.
I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.
Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.
I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.
When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.
The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.
Absolutely everything you experience in your life is a result of what you have given in your thoughts and feelings, whether you realize you have given them or not.
There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.
Work is the best wonder drug ever devised by God. Work is as necessary to man as eating and sleeping. Pleasure derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.
I tend to overuse the word "project" only because "book" is terrifying while I'm still in the middle of something. A project can fail. I don't want a book to fail.