Literature Quotes - Page 2

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination.

Hardware works best when it matters the least.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

Know how and how much to tip people who expect gratuities, even in the case of poor service.

Nobody can be as agreeable as an uninvited guest.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.