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Quotes by English Authors
"If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience."
"He was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it..."
"He who replies to words of doubtdoth put the light of knowledge out."
"This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated."
"People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal."
"And I would like to marry and have more children. I would like to try and do it right."
"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."
"Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged."
"As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I'll go on with my virgins."
"You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task."
"Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy."
"I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something."
"I'm not really sure what it was, the best moment. You always hope it's to come."
"I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest."
"We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that."
"The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity."
"They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances."
"The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law."
"You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens."
"There's nothing worse - I don't like listening to actors talk about the process, especially when - I mean, for me I've played a lot of guys, dudes, boys in a sense and this was a challenge for me just to play that official character."
"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
"If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger."
"We are here predominantly to support independent filmmakers and their needs. We are also here to assist people actually in their production, non-commercial people in their production."
"If there are any persons who contest a received opinion,or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thankthem for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoicethat there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought,if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality ofour convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves."
"Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice."
"If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers."
"You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era."
"Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life."
"No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself."
"He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much."
"I think people could be a bit friendlier. The only real contact you have with people is when they're annoyed if you've had a party - you know, it's been a bit too noisy for them or something."
"Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense."
"I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare-or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad-who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping."
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