Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
People always like to hear that they're under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they'd feel if they were told they weren't under stress.
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven't heard of some of them.
--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.
The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.
I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on.
Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.
I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.
Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
"How does one conquer fear, Don B.?" "One takes a frog and sews it to one's shoe," he said. "The left or the right?" Don B. gave me a pitying look. "Well, you'd look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn't you?" he said. "One frog on each shoe."
Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.
Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.
We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.
His examiner said severely: "Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature." "The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart."
I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.
Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.
Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.
Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: