Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different.
Press coverage has been difficult for him. I did not set out to ensnare him with a child.
Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.
It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.
The pattern of the prodigal is: rebellion, ruin, repentance, reconciliation, restoration.
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.
Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down.
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.
In my work, I attempt to deal with the Bible as I would deal with any work of literature.
Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.
I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
One of the surprising things in this world is the respect a worthless man has for himself.
I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.
Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.
Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.
It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.