Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.