Quote collection
762 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain."
"Don't talk about it; write."
"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."
"It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness."
"In that film Love Story, there's a line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other."
"Without the library, you have no civilization."
"It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt."
"Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books."
"To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next."
"So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily."
"We are anthill men upon an anthill world."
"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all."
"They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was."
"I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."
"In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required."
"My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!"
"Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates."
"I never went to college, so I went to the library."
"Those who don't build must burn."
"We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing... It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."