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Quotes by Writer
"I also identify as a Latin person, a person who has Latin blood."
37
"I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?"
37
"By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate."
37
"Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great."
37
"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
37
"Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics."
36
"The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that."
36
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
36
"To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor."
36
"Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot."
35
"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."
35
"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it."
35
"Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you."
35
"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
35
"Even the frankest and bravest of subordinates do not talk with their boss the same way they talk with colleagues."
35
"Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential."
35
"All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense."
35
"What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in."
35
"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."
35
"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."
35
"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."
Work,
35
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."
35
"We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks-we're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?"
35
"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."
34
"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
34
"The universe is full of doors."
34
"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally."
34
"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."
34
"Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone."
34
"A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself."
33
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