Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.
When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.
Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have paid.
DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.
I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one's feeling of honour.
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.
To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.