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Quotes by Writer

"At the time of the Revolution, dogs howled day and night all over Russia."

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts."

"Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it."


"It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you."


"Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible."


"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."

"What good is money if it can't buy happiness?"

"I claim the right to take a stand once in a while."

"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?"

"Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known."

"I will love you like the desert burns along the sun when they are together, and when you will be gone, just like every one else, I will cry for you like the snow that melts at the first hint of summer...and hoping that you'll be backI will miss you like the clouds lose themselves when it rains."

"Never settle; if it doesn't feel right, it's not suppose to."

"There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."

"Do you keep pace with those around you, or do you decide yourself just how you will live your life? The truth is...only you are qualified to set your standards. Only you can determine how you should live and what you will finally expect from yourself."

"He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent."

"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit."

"He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?"

"As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease."

"In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good."


"This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one."

"Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer."


"The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence. So intelligence is a hard thing to evaluate and it manifests itself in so many different ways. I do think the ability to know how to live a life and not be miserable is a sign of that."

"A lecture is an occasion when you numb one end to benefit the other."

"The thought of never crossing your path again is to enormous to bare, so for now I'll make dreams in my heart and remind myself to go and sit & remember them every once in a while."

"Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it."
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