American Quotes

I have never been beautiful in cliche terms.

'Forrest Gump' is filled full of moments where your heart just cheers.

Change is never easy.

I was raised to sense what someone wanted me to be and be that kind of person. It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.

It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.

Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it.

There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.

One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.

I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

Right or wrong, the customer is always right.

Goodwill is the only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.

Good will is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.

A man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them, and often has no opportunity to exercise judgment.

Give the lady what she wants!

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Here we have a baby. It is composed of a bald head and a pair of lungs.

He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.