top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Writer
"Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank."
83
"Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning."
83
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
83
"Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared."
82
"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."
82
"This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America."
82
"By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate."
82
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
82
"No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure."
81
"Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive."
81
"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."
81
"Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer."
81
"It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world."
81
"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
80
"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing."
80
"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better."
80
"The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it."
80
"The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils light in your eyes flowers at your feet duties at your hand the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life."
80
"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst."
80
"Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country."
79
"If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine."
79
"No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly."
79
"The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority."
79
"I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil."
Evil,
78
"She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape."
78
"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally."
78
"Trust yourself. You've survived a lot, and you'll survive whatever is coming."
78
bottom of page