Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
And to all of you, what it really comes down to is: If you're buying a book with my name on it, I feel I owe it to you to have it be the best book that I can make it.
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.
'The Names' is a story about a woman who might feel that she's in a kind of maze. She's unable to find her way forward or out because she can't see the whole picture.
When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.
One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.
As a test of the closeness of your relationship with the world, sex could never be a patch on being murdered. (That's when someone really does risk his life for you.)
The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides
As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.
I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.
What I believe when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason - and it's not to fail and die.
I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it - and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything - so they never get anything.
If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.
A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.
The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.
It's impossible to feel sad or have any negative feeling when you're grateful. If you're in the midst of a difficult situation, look for something to be grateful for.
Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.
Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.
Since our persons are not of our own making, when they are such as appear defective or uncomely, it is, methinks, an honest and laudable fortitude to dare to be ugly.
It has been a sort of maxim, that the greatest art is to conceal art; but I know not how, among some people we meet with, their greatest cunning is to appear cunning.
I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.
I don't worry about being a woman alone out there. My advice to people is to smile a lot, talk to strangers, accept all invitations and eat everything you're offered.
'The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does.
In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future.
Why should the search for happiness be only or essentially material and mental? Aren't there untold riches too in the moral, the sentimental and the spiritual realms?
At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.
I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.
Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink - all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink.
When advertisers ignore diversity, it is because they don't think the lives of others matter. There is not enough of a financial imperative for those lives to matter.
We have cellphones and smartphones and iDevices and laptops and the ability to be perpetually connected. We never have to miss anything, significant or insignificant.
Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today’s actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?
I don't own designer clothes, or a sports car, or a huge house, but I am seeing the world, experiencing amazing things, and I have become an environmental campaigner.
All the money in the world is no use to a man or his country if he spends it as fast as he makes it. All he has left is his bills and the reputation for being a fool.
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
There may be this hidden, hate-filled community of online cartoonists, but if there are, I haven't found it yet. We're all generally pretty nice people, it turns out!
I spent age 6-12 basically thinking about 'Back to the Future' all the time, so I think it's probably had a pretty huge influence on me and the way I think and write.
We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
More is learned in a public than in a private school, from emulation. There is the collision of mind with mind, or the radiation of many minds pointing to one center.
Pride is seldom delicate, it will please itself with very mean advantages; and envy feels not its own happiness, but when it may be compared with the misery of others
I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.
Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?
Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.