Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make.
Literature may be light as a cobweb, but it must be fastened down to life at the four corners.
I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!
SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.
If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.
I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.
Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.
A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
Amazon is evil, like anything big, but we can't help if it flows the very center of literature.
Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.
My dad was a big believer in treating people well, oftentimes even when he himself wasn't well.
I like books. I've always got a literature book going. I'd be in there reading, in my off time.
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.
'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.
Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.
Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.
You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning.
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.
We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.
We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.
If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself
As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.
Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends.
Be able to draw an illustration as least well enough to get your point across to another person.
And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.