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Quotes by Author

"Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different."

"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."

"Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality."

"The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life."

"If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it."
Time,

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston thought. "By making him suffer, he said."Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?..."

"People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics."

"But to have a friend, and to be true under any and all trials, is the mark of a man!"

"My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor."

"To keep a warm heart in winter is the real victory."

"The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!"

"If it be true that our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor, the distinction is probably due, in some measure, to the extremely important part which Talmud studies have played in the spiritual life of the race."

"Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships."

"I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not."

"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."


"The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible."

"Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment."

"To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization."

"Another very important aspect of the Protestant teachings is that money is simply a by-product, a natural consequence, a compensation, it is never the goal."

"I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it."

"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them."

"The clan is nothing more than a larger family, with its patriarchal chief as the natural head, and the union of several clans by intermarriage and voluntary connection constitutes the tribe."

"There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved for the sake of something greater."

"More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago."

"Life doesn't get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient."

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence."

"Be modest, humble, simple. Control your anger."

"I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

"There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned."

"Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!"


"We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. ['Disruption']"
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