J. Raymond Quotes

Any wrong decision you have ever made will become unimportant when your attention has shifted from it to a creative reason for living right here and now.

What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.

Art can be a kind of therapeutic, or kind of a fantasy life, or wish fulfillment...o r creating this alternate universe. Art gives me the freedom to do that.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up.

I have never understood why public opinion about European ideas should be taken into account.

I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn't. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn't.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.

It is always too soon to quit.

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

I don't want to express violence or anger or hate in my art. I want to express forgiveness.

Form, which should be the clean - cut expression of mechanical excellence has become sensuous and organic.

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

This present universe is the Kingdom of Heaven, and all we do is to clear away our misconception of it until we see It as It really is.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

The streets were dark with something more then night.

Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

Why should I be worried about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere.

If America wants to make "made in America" a symbol of excellence and worth. They have to make everything of high quality, otherwise the best.

Our ancestors who changed the world did so through new ideas which came to them as they acted.

Nothing is true unless it works. And it has to work for you, not for someone else.

I certainly admire people who do things.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

The only purpose of advertising is to sell. It has no other function worth mentioning.

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.

All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of 'making an effort'. I hate this idea today as much as I did as a child. I don't know why I hate it so much; I just do.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.'

Never leave well enough alone.

A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.

There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility.