Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.
That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.
Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.
The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.
This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.
The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.
How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.
When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.
In LA, I mean, here's this place full of desperate and sad people who take their only pleasure from destroying others for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement.
To the Latin, cynicism and middle age are synonymous. Look at our politicians - they move through their careers from left to center to right, like the hands of a clock.
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.
But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.
We already know that spam is a huge downside of online life. If we're going to be spammed on our telephones wherever we go, I think we're going to reject these devices.
Hitler had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs.
Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their way into the very being of the animal.
I grew up with the 'Star Wars' movies since before I have many memories. We had them on VHS back in the day, so they were part of the fabric of growing up in my family.
The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. MacKinnon’s unrealistic fulminations against a phantom patriarchy exist in the arid arena of pure thought.
It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.
The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.
If fantasy is done well, it has both serious content in a literary fashion and is a really good read as well - and children and young adults won't suffer anything else.
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Growing up as a kid, we moved all over the country on a fairly frequent basis, from New Jersey to Texas, California, Illinois... we moved 21 times in my first 17 years.
In this Music [the singing of the angels in harmony] the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur,and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.
For the trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are; and they put on the pride and beauty that we would fain wear ourselves.
Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages.
We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone.
History is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.
I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.
I understand it's great to read a great book, but it's better to live your life. It just helps me. It's uncomfortable at times, but you have to live outside the circle.
As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.
I learned to hide aspects of my personality. Playing with girls was fine, for example, but playing with their Barbies was something I could do only behind closed doors.
Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way.
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.
I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.
What's nice is between 'Wolverine and the X-Men' and 'Thor,' I get to write two very different kinds of stories. Both of them really seem to scratch some itches for me.
Has it never occurred to us, when surrounded by sorrows, that they may be sent to us only for our instruction, as we darken the eyes of birds when we wish them to sing?
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
In therapy , the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.
A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.
I played a role. That is what actors do. But I played it too well. I went too far. And by the time I wanted to stop, to take a bow and leave the stage, it was too late.