Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.
The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.
The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.
If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
...our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.
Lawyers didn't seriously get involved in the Watergate stories until quite late, when we realized we were on to something.
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
You never seem to hear about psychic occult attack in spiritual literature. This knowledge has been conveniently forgotten.
I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.
I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.
I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?
Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.
All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.