Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many people feel they must multi-task because everybody else is multitasking, but this is partly because they are all interrupting each other so much.
I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.
Standardization, instead of individualization. Cheap books, instead of private press editions. Active literature, instead of passive leather bindings.
I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.
I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.
I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life, and if Virtue is not its own reward, I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.
Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.
The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.
Computers may save time but they sure waste a lot of paper. About 98 percent of everything printed out by a computer is garbage that no one ever reads.
He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.
As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.
Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.
First, they were bred when I was not capable to observe or before I was born; likewise the breeding of men is of a different manner from that of women.
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent
Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.
Well, when you have an opportunity to build a show around one of the greatest detectives in all of literature, you're going to jump at that opportunity.
A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.
I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.
I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
If it's a woman it's caustic, if it's a man it's authority, If it's a woman it's too pushy, if it's a man it's aggressive in the best sense of the word.
Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.
If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed
Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.
I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
I suspect people channel-surf, as they tend to everywhere. But I'm told that we're not much on at the State Department, so we'll have to look into that.