Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.
If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.
'Dragnet' (the 1951 original, transferred nearly intact from radio) served as a veritable template for all cop shows to come.
The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
With every literary genre or form come some conventional expectations that the biblical authors either follow or deviate from.
Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.
Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities.
Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one's books in print, one's reputation alive.
Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.
I wouldn't call it a silver lining, but with more women speaking up, online harassment is beginning to be taken more seriously.
It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.
What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure.
If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.
By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.
The wren-box problem is becoming more acute each year, for wrens now demand better housing conditions and labor-saving devices.
I got to focus on my performance - learning how to perform is something I've been working on both personally and professionally.
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
A broken heart is a monument to a love that will never die; fulfillment is a monument to a love that is already on its deathbed.
A useful word previously unknown to me: 'ergophobia', meaning 'fear or hatred of work'. At last I can define myself in one word.
I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood.
Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.
The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there.
The Ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of Bees on the road. What they considered bad luck I couldn't say.
The fact is that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.
Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.
It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under oil for food ended up in the United States.
This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published.
Our long history of exploiting women's bodies and suppressing their voices had a direct impact on my case and other women's lives.
What I started to read and most enjoyed while I was a student was an Italian edition of 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.'
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.
My wife tells me I should check out 'Downton Abbey', but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.
We are the ones responsible to determine whether the war that our marines, soldiers and airmen are fighting in is worth the cause.
A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.
A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like.
What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.
Games have a huge impact on our society because the media plays a role in helping to shape our attitudes. So it's not just fantasy.
The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
Not as men of science , not as critics , not as philosophers , but as little children , shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven .
And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard.You know how dangerous, gentlemen of threescore?May you know it yet ten more.
Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.