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Quotes by English Authors
"There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman."
"Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean."
"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action."
"In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
"I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work."
"And in a marriage you can't TRY and be married. You're married or you're not married... as far as I'm concerned."
"The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous."
"I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere."
"There is a set of rules and a code of conduct that I believe that you should adhere to in life."
"We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness."
"The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory."
"What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must."
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."
"And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years."
"People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different."
"I would like to work with Jack Nicholson, before it's too late."
"The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."
"Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it."
"Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?"
"Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears."
"All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art."
"I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving."
"There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees."
"And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living."
"I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care."
"He leant his two elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands and remained rapt in dumb meditation. On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain."
"Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters."
"To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility."
"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves."
"Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies."
"You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance."
"If I'm going to represent God I have to do it the best I can."
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