Quote collection
302 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one."
"I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger."
"I've lived a lot in communist countries and they're intensely interested in money. I think they are more interested in money than capitalists are. They're the most materialistic people in the world. What they're actually living for is material things. The irony of that is that in communist countries there isn't anything to buy."
"With one exception everybody who has ever been involved with me is still a great friend of mine."
"If you happen to capture my imagination for some reason and I decide to write about you and you don't like what I wrote about you, which is entirely possible, then yes, I'm a dangerous writer."
"There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did."
"She sounds the way bananas taste."
"you got to want it to be good, and I don't want it."
"I would have liked to have known Oscar Wilde because I think he must have been very amusing and entertaining."
"When I make fried chicken I always serve masses and masses of fresh mangos. It's a great combination."
"I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to."
"all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved."
"Let's take everything just as it is."
"Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together."
"Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio."
"Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they're always wrong."
"You're wonderful. Unique. I love you."
"As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living."
"I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat."
"That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not."