I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work
As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
We do not judge great art. It judges us.
There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next.
. . . passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions -- a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.
A first book often has enough material in it for half a dozen.
Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.
I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities. It acts as a promoter of industry, as a stimulus to enterprise and as the most powerful restraint of public vice. . . . No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States with a different code of morals.
For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.
. . As always, she was carrying the washing. Rudy was carrying two buckets of cold water, or as he put it, two buckets of future ice.