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Quotes by Writer
"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."
86
"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."
Work,
86
"Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history."
85
"He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command."
82
"I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten."
82
"But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it."
82
"Don't ask why people keep hurting you. Ask yourself why are you allowing it to happen."
81
"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."
80
"In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world."
79
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
79
"We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report."
78
"Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil."
78
"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."
77
"General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be."
77
"Even the frankest and bravest of subordinates do not talk with their boss the same way they talk with colleagues."
77
"True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful."
77
"In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."
77
"Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken."
77
"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it."
75
"I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more."
75
"It's all a risk. Always. That's not true, actually. The only exception: it's a certainty that there's risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That's because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing."
74
"I may not understand, but I am willing to admire."
73
"If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy."
73
"Still, he figured, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do, and then sometimes you've just got to run like hell after it's done."
73
"The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light."
73
"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."
73
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