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Quotes by Writer
"There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it."
42
"All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense."
42
"The judge's massive eyebrows crept up. "Kaldar. Are you the one speaking for the plaintiff today?" "Yes, Your Honor.""Well, shit," Dobe said. "I guess you're familiar with the law. You hit it over the head, set its house on fire, and got its sister pregnant."
42
"A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises."
42
"Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God."
42
"In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible."
42
"An apparent misfortune of man is that neither good nor evil is an agency itself; both are equally passive choices. Man himself is the ultimate agency. He has the power to realize and activate the dead options. Only then, that is, by the action of Will, good results in good and evil in evil."
42
"Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating."
42
"Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds."
42
"She allowed herself to dwell on the cause of this strange, apprehensive exultation that she sensed flickering at the edge of her mind: it was the rarest thing of all - a man whom she knew at once, and without any qualification, to be her equal."
42
"I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more."
42
"Be able to recognize when you're reading or hearing material biased to your own side."
42
"Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature."
42
"It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe."
42
"There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it."
42
"No man or woman is an island. To exist just for yourself is meaningless. You can achieve the most satisfaction when you feel related to some greater purpose in life, something greater than yourself."
42
"All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about."
42
"Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools."
42
"If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts."
42
"Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think."
42
"No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart."
42
"I would close my eyes and dream of something strong, dream of horses exploding, rising into the air, their hearts beating survive, survive, survive."
42
"The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story."
42
"I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence."
42
"There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools."
42
"Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right."
42
"Don't be afraid of the dark. Shine!"
42
"In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins."
42
"Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age."
42
"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear. ... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... But he could choose not to listen."
42
"Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them."
42
"San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty."
42
"Morality and legality have nothing to do with one another. I'm more than fine with breaking a law if it disagrees with my values and morals."
42
"To confer dignity, forgive. To express contempt, forget."
42
"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."
42
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