Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
I believe there's too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.
None of my characters are rich or famous, and the situations they find themselves in could happen to anyone.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
And one who is just of his own free will shall not lack for happiness; and he will never come to utter ruin.
I want to be distinguished from the rest; to tell the truth, a friend to all mankind is not a friend for me.
If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
Up until about 12 years ago we never, ever, wore flak jacket or helmets but now the nastiness has got worse.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.
I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.
But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
I'm looking forward to talking to Bill Parcells, too, and to seeing how that marriage with Jerry Jones goes.
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.
We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.
I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.
Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.
Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?
The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.
I tended to faint when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood.
Some in journalism consider themselves apart from and to some extent above the people they purport to serve.
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
The more we get away from believing and studying literature, the worst we become, the more we lose our soul.
Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
I did it at night because I loved it. I never did it to make money, as a job. I just did it because I had to.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.
I am not sure about facelifts because I wouldn't want to be someone who just looks like she's had a facelift.
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.