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Quotes by Writer
"History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"Laughing deeply is living deeply."
7
"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."
7
"San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty."
7
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
7
"Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime."
7
"I live for those who love me, for those who know me true, for the heaven so blue above me, and the good that I can do."
7
"Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished."
7
"Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion."
7
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
7
"Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space."
7
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
7
"Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered."Yeah, said the voice from under the table, "you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel."
7
"Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?"
7
"The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal."
7
"No one should part with their individuality and become that of another."
7
"Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news."
7
"Why does Anna Karenina kill herself? the answer seems clear enough: for years people in her world have turned away from her; she is suffering at the separation from her son, Seryozha; even if Vronsky still loves her, she fears for that love; she is exhausted with it, overexcited, unwholesomely (and unjustly) jealous; she feels trapped. Yes, all that is clear; but is a trapped person necessarily doomed to suicide? So many people adapt to living in a trap! Even if we understand the depth of her sorrow, Anna's suicide remains an enigma."
7
"One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things."
7
"What if your art could provide everything you ever needed or wanted in life?"
7
"Require... electoral votes to be allocated in proportion to the popular votes."
7
"You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
7
"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire."
7
"Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised."
7
"Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds."
7
"They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey."
7
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