Writer Quotes

For me, the movies I like are all independent. And getting an independent feature made, it's like you get down to the selling organs part, and it just loses some of its luster.

Chick flick is not a term used to praise a movie. Nobody says 'it's a great chick flick.' It's a way of being derisive. I'm not clear why it's ok to do it.

To admit there is no god is to provide free license to pillage and rape with clear conscience.

The belief in some being who can be the judge of all human matters is a very comfortable one - all wrongs will be righted and all rights will be rewarded.

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.

One failure is worth seven and a half successes.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality.

The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing.

If peace only had the music and pageantry of war, there'd be no wars.

An industrious sinner I much prefer to a lazy saint.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

A human life is a schooling for eternity.

The duty of a toastmaster is to be so dull that the succeeding speakers will appear brilliant by contrast.

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.