Literature Quotations | Page 8

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

I'm pulling out, and I'm going to concentrate every ounce of time and energy over the next week working to defeat the recall because I realize now that's the only way to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

While the 1980 book was being serialized in the Sunday Times, Charles attacked it through the Observer.

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

You don't say, like the Bush crowd, 'I got this guy over here and I don't like him and I'm gonna get him, whether you back me or not.'

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

All three networks have always had a morning show but now cable of course is taking some of that audience away and a variety of other things, probably the Internet as well.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.

We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

Whether a revolution succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

I don't think a tough question is disrespectful.

I've always been the only girl in those environments. It's comfortable for me - I prefer it, actually.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I live on good soup, not on fine words.

It's the good loser who finally loses out.

No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half thought of it ourselves.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

I think that things happen individually first, and then collectively. It's not the other way around.

Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

In terms of broadcasting, you have to make decisions about where you want to spend your time.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

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.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Being faithful in that which is another man's qualifies us to receive our own.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

Start in a small TV station so you can make all of your embarrassing mistakes early and in front of fewer people!

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.

I don't pick subjects as much as they pick me.

I'm going to keep on dealing with the supernatural in a lot of ways.

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

There is great force hidden in a gentle command.

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

My wife thought I deserved it, but I always thought the Nobel a Western prize.

There are two ways to handle a woman, and nobody knows either of them.

The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.

We had more viewers on the broadcast network than we did on the cable channel.

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

I don't back down. I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political ideological forces.

They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors. It's hard to explain. They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all. I mean they were good, but they were too good.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

Once it was suggested that Saddam Hussein might give his weaponry to terrorists, or might use weapons himself in the region, then it became hard for the Democrats to say, 'Well, that can't happen.'

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.