Literature Quotes - Page 77

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.

Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.

Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.