American Quotes

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.

No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.

To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

A good beginning makes a good end.

A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.

To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.