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Quotes by Writer
"You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up. He was at his peak then. He was, naturally, dying to get out of the place he was in, and he recorded for us his appeal for pardon to the governor."
19
"Everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does. The wind has its reasons. We just don't notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. The wind knows everything that's inside you. And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen."
19
"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself."
19
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."
19
"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them."
18
"There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything."
18
"One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm."
18
"As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are."
18
"I may not understand, but I am willing to admire."
18
"Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them."
18
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."
18
"Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses."
18
"Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty."
18
"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."
Work,
18
"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
17
"A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it."
17
"The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to."
17
"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
17
"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
17
"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper."
17
"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."
17
"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken."
17
"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."
17
"A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself."
16
"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men."
16
"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
16
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."
16
"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."
16
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