Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.
In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
Because of Kipling, I've sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland - zero, when last I checked - we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.
The Earthworm plows the whole world with his tunnels, drains and aerates the earth… If you ever buy any land, be sure it has plenty of Earthworms toiling and moiling all day so that you can sit down and relax.
It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.
Why are men impersonating women funny while women impersonating men are not? It is a matter of gravity. A heavy thing trying to become lighter is automatically funnier than a light thing trying to become heavy.
The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.
Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read.
Watteau is no less an artist for having painted a fascia board while Sainsbury's is no less effective a business for producing advertisements which entertain and educate instead of condescending and exploiting.
It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a smart, sophisticated, civilized alternative to commercial TV - not a cheap imitation of it.
I always thought I'd buy my mother a house if I ever became successful - a big, beautiful house on the nicest street in town. It didn't exactly work out that way. I was still borrowing money from her in my 40s.
As this case has progressed, the evidence that the prosecution has claimed exists against me has been proven less and less and less. And all that has happened is that they've filled these holes with speculation.
Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's heart, that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the gospel.
I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.
I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage.
We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose in this battle.
If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.
I am a marked person, and no one who's unmarked is going to understand that. It's very intimidating. I don't even know what my place is anymore. What's my role in society? Who am I, after everybody has branded me?
I love the look of books published by the firm of Rupert Hart-Davis: They strike me as handsome, elegant, and inviting. I'll pick up almost anything with that imprint, especially if it's in a jacket or priced low.
A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.
Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.
For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.
Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself -- none of these can compensate for the loss of vitality only research provides.
I didn't confess. I was interrogated. They acted like my answers were wrong. They told me I was wrong, that I didn't remember correctly, that I had to remember correctly. And if I didn't, I would never see my family.
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.
How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.
When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.
I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.
All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.
The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.
Women occupy, in great masses, the 'household tasks' of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.
The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.
The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.
In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.
Michael Jackson was one of popular culture's greatest artists. Nobody danced better. Few sang more compellingly. No one understood more about stage spectacles or music videos. He was an innovator. His reach was global.
I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to diss them. But you don't really have any guarantees that what you're reading wasn't written out of friendship or spite.
I've been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume - four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall - made by a company called Denbigh.
I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.
They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.
Charlie Parker was the greatest individual musician that ever lived. Every instrument in the band tried to copy Charlie Parker, and in the history of jazz there had never been one man who influenced all the instruments.
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
You don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.