Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The truth is always multiplex.
Suggestion is a literary strategy.
Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
What you are will make you what you will become.
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.
I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.
There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.
Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.
A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.
Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.
Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.
Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city.
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.
I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!
The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.
If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.
Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.
'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.
All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.
There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.
A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.
A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.
The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.
The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.
Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.
I suppose the problem ... is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and the other takes up.