Quote collection
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"The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae."
"In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me."
"You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too."
"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."
"Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me."
"It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: 'Good-bye."
"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."
"If it weren't for the people always getting tangled up with the machinery... Earth would be an engineer's paradise."
"To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life."
"Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho."
"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone."
"The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow."
"Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales."
"The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems."
"Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either."
"The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't."
"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."
"The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are."
"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."
"Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?"