Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.
Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person.
It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.
Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.
If a liberal political philosophy stands for anything, and I am no longer sure it does, then it must mean that we are committed to the leveling of the playing field for everyone.
Don't stay in a bad situation - whether it is a relationship or a job - out of fear of failure. It's not a failure to walk away and choose to be happy. It takes a lot of courage.
I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.
But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.
Some is, I think, the personal in any act of writing. You find yourself caught up: you start a sentence, and it becomes revelatory, not just of the character, but of you as well.
Exploration of the natural world begins in early childhood, flourishes in middle childhood, and continues in adolescence as a pleasure and a source of strength for social action.
The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean." "Who's-" "Because you're gay.
I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?
so what brings you to the doctor today?" "hmm, im afraid i have the chronic desire to save people" "i know about that. i've got it too. maybe it's catching." "not catching enough
I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.
And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.
I loved going along with Alice Steinbach as she goes off on this rare, wonderful adventure, an escape into discovering herself and some of the truly magical places in this world.
If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.
Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.
Democracy is no solution - it's just 51% bossing the other 49% around. For God's sake, Hitler was democratically elected! Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie.
Once you are in the endgame, the moment of truth has arrived... The amount of points that can be gained (and saved) by correct endgame play is enormous, yet often underestimated.
Ability for stupendous toil is lodged in every human spirit, a grand gift from the God of nature; but only the persevering worker knows what this latent power is able to achieve.
Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.
The Cloud Maze. “ An Excursion in Dimension A Climb Though the Firmament; There Is No Beginning There Is No End Enter Where You Please Leave When You Wish Have No Fear of Falling
War begun without good provision of money beforehand for going through with it is but as a breathing of strength and blast that will quickly pass away. Coin is the sinews of war.
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won't know the difference and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
Es binden Sklavenfesseln nur die H a« nde, Der Sinn, er macht den Freien und den Knecht. The chains of slavery can only bind the hands. The mind makes us either free or enslaved.
Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.
Someone who is reluctant to say what he needs to say, often ends up doing so with an insolence whose crassness is proportionate tohis fear, once he gathers the necessary courage.
No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.
Energy is connected to physical fitness. One of the reasons I stayed at the top so long is that I was tremendously fit. At 36, I was fitter than most opponents ten years younger.
Superman has been around for so long; he's been around for, what, eight decades now? And he goes through these different eras where different aspects of who he is get emphasized.
When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen.
Meditation is that exercise of the mind by which it recalls a known truth, as some kind of creatures do their food, to be ruminated upon till all the valuable parts be extracted.
I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.
The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.
The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.
Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.
Sometimes I can see colour without opening my eyes. I saw that Billy's heart was no colour and every colour. Like water or diamonds or crystals, it's pure and reflects the light.
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.
If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition.