Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.
I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.
"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.
Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
There's almost nothing like native Midwesterner anywhere else in the world, except in Asia. They're miracles all in themselves.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.
God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!
Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.
You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.
Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.
That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.
A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next
They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.
I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.
He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
love is a hawk with velvet claws love is a rock with heart and veins love is a lion with satin jaws love is a storm with silken reins
The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.
Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.
The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.
The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.
I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.
Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.
I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.
It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.