Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.
I think young people ought to seek the experience that is going to knock them off center.
The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.
America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.
I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.
I was once asked if I'd like to meet the president of a certain country. I said, "No, but I'd love to meet some sheepherders." The sheepherders, farmers and taxi drivers are often the most interesting people.
I've spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am a brother to all who share the same aspiration.
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
. . . Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed . . . old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved . . . At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly.
Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.
Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was.
No idea is ever dead until those who believe in it say it's dead.
I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.
For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, what you northerners never appreciate...is that Texas is so big that you can live your life within its limits and never give a damn about what anyone in Boston or San Francisco thinks.
Writers turn dreams into print.
The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east
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