“I don't know what my expectations are. It's like the word 'potential.' Those two words don't mean a whole lot to me. We can't please everybody. Certainly, we have to please ourselves first.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 184 of 303
“When you get to know someone, you find there's something nasty in their woodshed.”
“We blame equally him who is too proud to put a proper value on his own merit and him who prizes too highly his spurious worth.”
“The whole pleasure of being in a state of unknowing is that as long as you don’t know, all possible outcomes feel as if they are happening.”
“The graphic emphasis placed on those first lines is rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference.”
“The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.”
“People don't want advice...only corroboration.”
“When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.”
“When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.”
“The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.”
“but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.”
“I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.”
“We cannot bear for our most mysterious experiences to remain unexplained. I've therefore learned...that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.”
“I am the kind of person that takes everything as is and then look at it from the outside looking in.”
“Certainly the experiences of Seth and his relationship to his parents and his point of view of the world are very similar to my own and very much based on my experiences at the University of Southern California.”
“Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.”
“Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery. . . . If you want to influence someone, listen to what he says. . . . When he finishes talking, ask him about any points that you do not understand.”
“The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell.”
“According as the man is, so must you humour him.”
“You ought not to practice childish ways, since you are no longer that age.”