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Quotes by Writer
"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."
9
"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."
9
"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."
9
"Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it."
9
"Wherever we are, it is our friends that make our world."
9
"He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must."
9
"The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
9
"I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does."
9
"Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him."
9
"When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
9
"This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea."
9
"Know how your representatives stand on major national or state issues."
9
"We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity."
9
"I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."
9
"We focus upon pairs of words very often which are the same in some areas and different in other areas."
9
"Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition."
9
"Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins."
9
"True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings."
9
"I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too."
9
"There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another."
9
"A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something."
9
"The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives."
9
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
9
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
9
"That's what the cat said to the canary when he swallowed him - 'You'll be all right.'"
9
"I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life."
9
"Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot."
9
"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it."
9
"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."
9
"If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that."
9
"For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role."
Help,
9
"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."
9
"Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world!"
9
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