Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That's what is was to be young - to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
Well, it's practically over, thank God - I'm 83, there won't be that much more of it to put up with I don't think!
I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
If it weren't for the people always getting tangled up with the machinery... Earth would be an engineer's paradise.
If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.
He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.
That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.
My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.
We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
You can't fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.
What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.
I've been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.
We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.
Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.
The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
He became fubar in the classic way, which is to say that he was the victim of a temporary arrangement that became permanent.
No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.
I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.
There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.
Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.