top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run."
59
"It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them."
59
"The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness."
59
"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything."
59
"I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication."
59
"believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic."
59
"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."
59
"I knew more about Texas than the Texans and when they told me I would find summer here I smiled knowingly."
59
"Working with Woody Allen is like filming Howard Hughes's will. It's a very mysterious and strange event. You never get a peek at the whole will."
Will,
59
"Again, we turn down most books that have been self-published unless they have a special track record. We have taken a small number on, however, and sold them to major publishers for a nice sum. But that is an exception to the rule."
59
"Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune."
59
"I don't make my own schedule - it's constructed around my sons' school schedules."
59
"Some won't appreciate you no matter how much you do for them. Release yourself. Go where you're appreciated and understood."
59
"We say of an animal that it is intelligent, and we say the same thing of a woman; but in neither case is it usually appropriate, clearly for very different reasons."
59
"The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it."
59
"I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics."
59
"I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology."
59
"Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster."
59
"The question that naturally occurs is "What would it be like if a star exploded nearby? Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?"
59
"What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?"
59
"The thing about a hero, is even when it doesn't look like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, he's going to keep trying to do right and make up for what's gone before, just because that's who he is."
59
"Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars."
59
"I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."
59
"Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures."
59
"Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it's mercenary of me, but there it is."
59
"When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one."
59
"Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer."
59
"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."
59
"Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around."
59
bottom of page