Quote collection
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat."
"There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness."
"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity."
"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail."
"A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer."
"Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."
"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
"All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born."
"There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone."
"I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else."
"Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex."
"We are most artistically caged."
"I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers."
"Dear Jesus, do something."
"I confess, I do not believe in time."
"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."
"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
"if a violin string could ache, i would be that string."