Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.
A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.
Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?
How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.
It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.
Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.
failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.
No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.
Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.
as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.
Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.
The judgment of music, like the inspiration for it, must come slow and measured, if it comes with truth.
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.
I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.
Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.
Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.
I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.
It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.
Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.
Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.
If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on.
We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.
There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.
You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.
I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.
Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.
Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.
Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.
We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth.
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.