top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book."
61
"For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role."
Help,
61
"Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter."
61
"The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself."
61
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind."
61
"Conservatives must avoid the siren song of schism, or all is lost."
60
"Principles are a dangerous form of social dynamite."
60
"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."
60
"Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language."
60
"Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider's ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve."
60
"America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization."
60
"Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust."
60
"Depart from discretion when it interferes with duty."
60
"In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can."
60
"It is kindness to immediately refuse what you intend to deny."
60
"The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring."
60
"And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it."
60
"You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions."
60
"It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."
60
"The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair."
60
"There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times."
60
"Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence."
60
"I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless."
60
"My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised."
60
"Getting emotional about things is a peacetime luxury. In wartime, it's much too painful."
60
"Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run."
60
"The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility."
60
"The person who doesn't value you is blocking you from the one who will. Let them go."
60
"Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength."
60
"Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation."
60
"When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer."
60
"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."
60
"I certainly believe it's over for the jury system, but we won't admit it for a while."
60
bottom of page