Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.
To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.
We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.
I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Walking into a room filled with people you don't know but who know you brings out your worst vulnerabilities.
During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.
Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.
I wanted to write literature that pushed people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them.
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.
I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.
If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.
Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.
In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.
To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.
Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.
The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.
The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.
We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves.
Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.
The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.