Conventions Quotes

At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

I don't believe in convention at all. I do what I have to do to stay alive.

If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there's something called the Geneva Convention we're going to have to pull out of. It would defy every norm that is America.

Liverpool have played with no real convention.

a deviation from propriety scarcely ever escapes punishment.

There's a better chance of a brokered convention than any time in our lifetime.

We didn't discover our values in a poll taken a week before the convention.

The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.

I was told that Federalist Society conventions were intellectually serious, courteous, and open to various points of view, and that has certainly been my experience.

I do conventions sometimes every other weekend. Whenever I have time, and it's not too far away. I get a lot of invitations (to appear at conventions) in other countries and I have to turn them down.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential.

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

Every day you meet a delegation going to some convention to try and change the way of somebody else's life.

If you eliminate the names of Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Jackson and Wilson, both conventions would get out three days earlier.

Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.

People may make fun of me because I’m wearing something odd, but it’s still good to be alive.

All the joys—animal and human—of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.