Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.