Cynicism is full of naive disappointments.
The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.
Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
There will never again be a day exactly like today. There will never again be a moment exactly like this moment. After my next birthday, I will never again be the age I am right now. After midnight tonight, today will be part of history. Someday I'll be dying and I'll wish I'd done all the things I want to do now. Someday I'll be dead and I won't be able to do anything. But today, right now, I'm alive. And yet I'm writing nonsense on the back of my literature book. But I'm alive. And yet I'm just sitting here. But I'm alive.
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.
Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.
These little grey cells. It is up to them.
I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?
I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life.
A great speech is literature.
Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?
It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.
A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.