Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.
Failing to engage in conflict is a terrible decision, one that puts our temporary comfort and the avoidance of discomfort ahead of the ultimate goal of our organization.
I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and... well... it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess.
Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.
More than we sleep, play, or make love, we work. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - this dominant daily grind, much of our literature is biased toward other pursuits.
The juggernaut that is steampunk, like Dr. Loveless's giant mechanical spider in the 1999 film version of 'The Wild, Wild West,' seems capable of crushing all naysayers.
When I fell, some people were in such shock that they didn't reach out. They were so mad at me, rather than having compassion for what happened. I lost a lot of friends.
For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth.
If by reaction you mean critical reaction, I was confident that we were putting out a quality book [ Treachery]. So I was reasonably sure that we'd get positive notices.
I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.
To seduce the enemies soldiers from their allegiance and encourage them to surrender is of special service, for an adversary is more hurt by desertion than by slaughter.
Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.
If you and I are to be used in our sphere as D.L. Moody was used in his, we must put all that we have and all that we are in the hands of God, for Him to use as He will.
I read everywhere. I read every day. I read on the couch with my dog in the afternoon and at night. I try to read at least two to three hours a day. I read only fiction.
The happiest pillow on which you may rest your head is the knowledge of God's will. I cannot imagine a more miserable situation than consciously to be out of God's will.
When I see someone for the first time in a while, and they ask, 'How have you been?' or 'What have you been up to?', it's politeness but a bit of a conversation stopper.
Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode.
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do-and they don’t. They have prejudices.
There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.
All of this abundance begins to shine through a mind that is aware of it's own infinite nature. There's enough for everyone. See it. Believe it. it will show up for you.
And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.
I had experiences along the way that helped me to realize that letting go was the way that worked for me to find something that I, personally, as a reader, love to read.
However, there's three reasons for doing things in this particular world. One is love, one is prestige and the other's money. If you get all three together, that's fine.
A controller doesn't trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life. There is no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.
President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.
President Bush will come here and there will be new 'friends' of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who 'liberated' them.
What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.
Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.
Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology...Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality.
"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.
It's mandatory in this day and age to be considered to have a sense of humor and to demonstrate it. You're not paying me for a joke, You're paying me for the right joke.
I remember when humor was gentle pokes. I used to call it 'arm around the shoulder' humor. Now they go for the jugular and they take no prisoners. It's mean, mean stuff.
It is a pity that, commonly, more care is had--yea, and that among very wise men--to find out rather a cunning man for their horse than a cunning man for their children.
Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.
Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.
Body and spirit I surrendered whole To harsh instructors and received a soul... If mortal man could change me through and through From all I was What may the God not do?
But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.
'Comfort Me with Apples' is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.
Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.
Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise.
The specualtist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity; and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.
My earliest memory is my parents forgetting my fourth birthday. My dad looked up from reading the paper and went, 'Oh my God!' So we went out, and I chose a red scooter.
The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it?
I like to think about the bestseller list as, "This is the medicine cabinet of a very sick country." Let me look and see what they're reading that isn't nourishing them.
Every writer I admire is my teacher. If you look at it, and if you care to read carefully enough and to read and reread a text, you teach yourself something about craft.