Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major
Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.
I deny that there's such a thing as a gay person. I deny there's such a thing as a heterosexual person.
We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean.
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'
I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.
After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.
You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects.
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.
Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.