Quote collection
697 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive."
"What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us."
"It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?"
"I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog."
"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
"I believe that love cannot be bought except with love."
"It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming."
"Only through immitation do we develop toward originality."
"The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness."
"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
"Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning."
"Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him."
"It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones."
"No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony."
"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."
"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."
"I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap."
"A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."
"All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight."
"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."