Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.
If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.
I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical, it is the wind resistance that produces the tragic curve.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
A democracy depends upon people getting brighter all the time. Democracies are delicate. They're not just ipso facto and just go on and on.
We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.
While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.
No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.
Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.
People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.