Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?