Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!
You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.
You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.
When the economic orthodoxy can no longer deliver, political turbulence follows. That doesn't mean the left will win, but it means there is an opportunity to be seized.
To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.
In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.
You can't let doubt or fear or guilt eat away at you. You are good and you need to remember that above all else. Love is stronger than hatred, and you are made of love.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.
Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.
As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being.
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it.
Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it.
Taxes are important. President Bush's tax proposals leave no rich person behind. Voters approve of President Bush helping the kind of people they wish they were one of.
I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.
That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.
There was plenty of life left and if he had to he would use it all to get her back. The time had passed for making promises to her-all that was left for him was to act.
There are some famous people, and I've met them, who you might think are great, and then you meet them, and you discover that they not only have feet but heads of clay.
The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.
I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.
When I talk to children, I show them a typical drawing I made when I was six and point out to them that when I was their age, I didn't draw any better than any of them.
What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.
Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing!
Dubai,I think is a big bore - a city deliberately built to appeal to tourism, and only built for that purpose, and not possessing a valid culture or history of its own.
I've learned how to turn the adversities in my life into enriching experiences. You can actually gain a lot from adversities and they make you the person you are today.
Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.
Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.
Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.
....there is a difference between hearing and listening. You can't always help what you hear. But you can control what holds your interest, what you choose to dwell on.
I could only be frustrated right from the day I started in WCW and realized that it was a company run by a bunch of idiots that didn't have a clue what they were doing.
I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.
They make a humongous profit, but the people that work on the shows don't get paid a lot because they're working on the Oscars show. It's the biggest show in the world.
Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.
Dear little head, that lies in calm content Within the gracious hollow that God made In every human shoulder, where He meant Some tired head for comfort should be laid.
The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.
Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.
He that gives a portion of his time and talent to the investigation of mathematical truth, will come to all other questions with a decided advantage over his opponents.
Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.
It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
If you can't get to be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die happy.
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round!
I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason-but who would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at the corner.
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.
Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.
The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.
At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.
I do think it is harder to acknowledge our strengths, or to forgive ourselves and each other for our shortcomings, when there has not been a result we can all agree on.
I'm an observer. I read about life. I research life. I find a corner in a room and melt into it. I can become invisible. It's an art, and I am a wonderful practitioner.
As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something.