Writer Quotes

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!

There is no real excellence in all of this world which can be separated from right living.

No one is really miserable who has not tried to cheapen life.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.

When the war ends, it will be found that there was an equal amount of 'thuggery' practiced on both sides, that terrible things were done to force the final victory.

Nations are not thugs. They are bodies of intelligent people.

In any case, fighting will not settle whether the claims were just or unjust. It will only settle which nation can mobilize and handle its fighting forces and its economic forces the better.

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.

This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one.

Mainly as sort of blueprints for dealing with most of the adults in their lives, to some extent with their fellows. It is this notion of aiming high and there's always hope, aim low and you might as well stop now.

It's a lucky child that knows that they're a genius, unaimed and all that.

It seems to me that humour is everybody's way of keeping sane and standing off from the situations so that they can see it intellectually, as well as emotionally, and I don't know whether you've noticed, but if somebody tells a joke, it's nearly always a mini fantasy.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

I find it just simply takes me right back to those times, and I really can't take it, I don't want to, I mean, why should I face up to it? What good does it do me? I know it happened, and that's it.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

Actually, in the wild, we'd be the only person that we wouldn't recognize, if you think about it.

This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything.

And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.

I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.

Writing is not fun.