Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.
I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.
No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.
Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
I don't know if many people know this about me, but I have multiple sclerosis. So I don't have time for a lot of shades of gray. I don't have time for BS.
I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.
Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.
The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.
There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface.
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.
The same is true of ranking him thus against any work of literature. [Bob Dylan] has been made, through no fault of his own, the object of odious tokenism.
The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.
The benefits of the accomplished journey cannot be weighed in terms of perfect moments, but in terms of how this journey affects and changes our character.
Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.
Now the novels that are read are purely entertainment – well done, very polished, with a very effective technique – but not literature, just entertainment.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.
The month of January, we were number one. Now, this is something we're proud of, because we recognize we're up against a formidable operation there at CNN.
In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.
My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
Our Lord never condemned the fig tree because it brought forth so much fruit that some fell to the ground and spoiled. He only cursed it when it was barren.
We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of.
Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.
I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's nothing that says Hitman will be collected, though it might be.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
In America today, if your sensibilities are offended by something that has happened, you get an enormous amount of credibility and are taken very seriously.
To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.
I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.
I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.
There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.
You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.