Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am nobody but myself.
I blundered into writing.
My hole is warm and full of light.
...and yet I am what they think I am.
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.