Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy."
"I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town."
"The best fiction is far more true than any journalism."
"Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
"Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing."
"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is."
"I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone."
"The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it."
"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do."
"I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from."
"The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with."
"No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
"The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next."
"War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy."
"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
"...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time."
"As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation."
"Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice."
"Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself."
"Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail."