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Quotes by Writer

"Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed - there's so little competition."

"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it."

"Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world."

"Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about "let's see" and "try". If there's no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated."

"A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

"Hey, you want to hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you."

"We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it's gone forever."

"Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old."

"Personal satisfaction is the most important ingredient of success."

"The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation."

"Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential."

"The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes."

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."

"I've always said fantasy is sort of 'stealth philosophy'."

"While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying."

"Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals."

"When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression."

"A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results."

"History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all."

"By helping readers understand these mechanics, I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone, why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe."

"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."

"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition."

"All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning."

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up."

"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."


"I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started."

"Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness."

"You don't have to stick with these recipes. They're guides. As I say, they're a way in. Have fun with them. It's an easier way to cook in a busy life, once you get the hang of it."

"This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be."

"Laughing deeply is living deeply."

"What women have to stand on squarely is not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way."

"San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty."

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
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