Literature Quotes

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

The Thriller album is still the biggest album of all time. That is still returning huge royalty cheques.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Shootouts are not gunfights of honor, they're gang wars and racial riots.

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

I slept and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

We're not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I'm sure.

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

God authors desires in your heart, then fulfills His Will by enabling you to realize those desires.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.

I just wish we knew a little less about his urethra and a little more about his arms sales to Iran.

What was funny if you were there is that we were all immensely sophisticated people who knew exactly what she was going to say and we're chatting away, nice to see you.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.