Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
Most of the famous love affairs of literature or film were quite short. What was 'Romeo & Juliet'? How long were they together? A few days.
Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
I credit literature for the reason I act because that was the door to me saying, ‘Oh! I can be somebody else. I can exist as someone else.’
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
men have been in charge of according value to literature, and ... they have found the contributions of their own sex immeasurably superior.
I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.
Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.
When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.
When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.
I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.
The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.
No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.
I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.
The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
If I'm in danger then it's usually my fault and it's up to me to get myself out of it. I am not in it just to get an adrenalin rush. No way!
It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.
I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
He who is silent must be agreed with, for what shall the wings of opposition thresh upon, without the winds of conversation to shoulder them.
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
A Pulitzer Prize is awaiting the journalist who can find an American who dies of hunger, and probably the Nobel Prize for literature as well.
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
The usual channels of university studies or secretarial work did not appeal to me. I cherished difficult dreams through confidence in myself.
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
We often see literature about women that impair and immerse the women themselves, such as when women are portrayed as objects of consumerism.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.