Quote collection
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."
"A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style."
"I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing."
"And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them."
"A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief."
"Don't make everyone know about your sadness."
"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
"The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability."
"In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different."
"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world."
"A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody."
"You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway."
"The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you."
"Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain."
"And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen."
"Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them."
"And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus."
"Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised."
"There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be."
"Anything that just costs money is cheap."