American Writer Quotations

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five-year-old.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.

It's as if our electric grid didn't even have fences around it. This is disgraceful what we do, and what we don't do, to protect the Internet.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

May you live to see the green grass growing over your grave.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.

There is, indeed, no single quality of the cat that man could not emulate to his advantage.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

You sound like a man with a vision. Care to pass that bong over this way?

This is a revolution, damnit! We're going to have to offend somebody!

I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

It is the responsibility of leadership to provide opportunity, and the responsibility of individuals to contribute.

Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Nobody's a natural. You work to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top.

To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it life will be valueless.

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a net.

Today, if you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Bill, The United States is not a company. It is a country.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

Glorious as it had been, the city-state was obsolete.

To make crime unprofitable, let the government run it.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

The future of that ancient chamber remains in considerable doubt.

King Arthur was one of my heroes - I played with a trash can lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur.

Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well.

It seems every year, people make the resolution to exercise and lose weight and get in shape.

A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.

It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

The public, more often than not, will forgive mistakes, but it will not forgive trying to wriggle and weasel out of one.

You have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Love as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.

We're just moving along as quick as possible.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as nuclei for the new network.

I don't think I'll get married again. I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house.

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.

After the book took off, I bought a whole new wardrobe.

It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

I grew up here and my friends are here. There's nothing wrong with here.

Rush has done some top-notch quality work, and we're very, very pleased with them. We really enjoy working with them. They are on time and on budget, which makes me happy.

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

Don't be a time manager, be a priority manager. Cut your major goals into bite-sized pieces. Each small priority or requirement on the way to ultimate goal become a mini goal in itself.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience.

How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

After a few years of marriage a man can look right at a woman without seeing her and a woman can see right through a man without looking at him.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in YOU than there was before.

She not only expects the worst, but makes the worst of it when it happens.

My kids are free to do what ever they want. Because I only advise. I don't make them do anything.

One should never be sexually involved with anyone one genuinely cares for. A sexual relationship guarantees a loss.

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.

Memphis is a great town, man. There's a great musical community here. I'm trying to fit in.

Performance Art is brief, about 15 minutes long. This is a problem in that you cannot get people to come out to watch a 15-minute performance.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

From time to time, I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.

For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that my life holds nothing for me but being a writer.

He does what I have always needed to have done to me, and that is that he dominates me.

He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you're going away.

That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

Little old ladies of both sexes. Why do I let them bother me?

It is better to go down in infamy than to never go down at all.

The act is truth. Nothing that was ever recorded is truth. Nothing that was ever said is truth. Only the act.

My career was 100% different from what I intended to do. I thought I'd photograph nature and landscapes but I wound up photographing the changing of the times.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that.

Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

When revenues are short, one of the first things you can do is cut back on services.

Why should one U.S. airman give up his life when our national security is not in imminent danger?

True revolutionaries are like God -- they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

The plastic on your sandwich really doesn't have to be made to last 50 years.