“Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 869 of 4756
“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”
“I think I am mad sometimes.”
“I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!”
“I think I may well be a Jew.”
“I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.”
“I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.”
“The classical music is soothing and stimulating, good for thinking.”
“I was wasting my life, always thinking about myself.”
“I know by now you think I should have straightened myself out - Thank you, drop dead!”
“Because you wear a uniform, a smelly uniform...and so you think you can be rude to me.”
“I like to think that there is a clear majority of people who's be supportive of the idea, It does save the existing industry. It does provide hundreds of millions of dollars for the Commonwealth.”
“I am still my teenage self. If you think that we all step through a door marked Adult, or that we sign a Grown-Up Document, you’re quite wrong. We remain as we always were, and that, alas, is one of life’s many nasty tricks.”
“I don't think I've ever made a conscious effort to alter the sound. I don't see the point. I have to remain true to how I sing. I'm perfectly happy with what I am. Whatever that is.”
“Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.”
“I think we rarely recognize the fifth business in our lives at the time those people are changing us.”
“There is a relationship between humor and fear. Think of all the gags you ever heard that have to do with dismemberment, or something that's horrible in one way or another, even if it's just horrible in the sense that somebody's being embarrassed. What do kids laugh at? Kids laugh if your fly's down. That's hilarious. But for the kid whose fly is down, it's a horrible situation.”
“God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.”
“My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.”
“It was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.”