Writer Quotes

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Those are the two best words in English, 'Bidding' and 'war'.

No one prepared me for the stress and insanity of a week leading up to a movie. Years and years of work come down to three days.

The future of that ancient chamber remains in considerable doubt.

Require... electoral votes to be allocated in proportion to the popular votes.

Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered.

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

Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy. But its chances also depend on what we do ourselves.

As in Athens, the right to participate was restricted to men, just as it was also in all later democracies and republics until the twentieth century.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Their chief residence was Bagdad, where they remained until the eleventh century, an age fatal in Oriental history, from the disasters of which the Princes of the Captivity were not exempt.

The wise make proverbs, and fools repeat them.

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

Happy the man when he has not the defects of his qualities.

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius.

Certain it is that their power increased always in an exact proportion to the weakness of the Caliphate, and, without doubt, in some of the most distracted periods of the Arabian rule, the Hebrew Princes rose into some degree of local and temporary importance.

All is extremely genteel; and there is almost as much repose as in the golden saloons of the contiguous palaces. At any rate, if there be as much vice, there is as little crime.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.