Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
That good sense which nature affords us is preferable to most of the knowledge that we can acquire.
That delay is our surest protection which enables us to deliberate on the merits of our intentions.
When one consorts with assassins, one must expect to dance along the edge of a knife once or twice.
As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.
Morely: You're trying to make me [i]Amelie[/i] Oliver: Goodness, no. You'd look terrible in a skirt
Now could you please ask these idiots to stop pointing their bullets at me? It's terribly wasteful.
What was your name again?" "Still Eve." "No, I'm sure it's something else. That doesn't seem right.
I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.
I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.
When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself
Advertising enriches life by quickening the imagination, arousing interest and enlarging the taste.
The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.
I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.
If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't.
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.
The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.
Thus through half-belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from.
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
I don't know. I just feel stuck, like I'm afraid to take any steps, in case they're the wrong ones.
Content is more than 'subject matter.' It is all the feelings and ideas you bring to your painting.
There is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstances of your life can change!
If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.
Navigate by the same star, unwilling to change, and you find yourself not only off-course but lost.
My way of writing a book is completely disorganized - to hurl myself at the problem, over and over.
My eyes are wide open to the conflicts within the Church, but I don't think you can call it schism.
Ive lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once created, or produced, the art of fiction.
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.
I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.
Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.
Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.
Wait'll next year! is the favorite cry of baseball fans, football fans, hockey fans, and gardeners.
It all boils down to this: A person has only two options in life, to do something or to do nothing.
If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.
When I got to college, I didn't take writing classes, just the standard freshman composition class.
Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.
Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.
Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.
They shouldn't hate each other . . . I don't hate the Socs any more . . . they shouldn't hate . . .