The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department,...
To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
Whatever we've said, friends, we're saying still-- such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be
What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?
We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife.
This is not the case. I find scant evidence in my nonfiction that I have matured at all. I cannot find a single idea I hadn’t swiped from somebody else and enunciated plonkingly by the time I reached...
There is a fine article in the current Reader’s Digest with the title, There are No Atheists in Foxholes.
The pride in strength and important mystery showed no less in the eyes of the sweepers than in those of the machinists and inspectors, and in those of the foreman, who alone was without a lunchbox. A
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. Al...
Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved?
She quieted, and turned away under his stare. Inadvertently, he’d gained the upper hand. He had somehow communicated the thought that had bobbed up in his thoughts unexpectedly: that her strength and...
Poi si voltò verso di me, per farmi vedere com'era arrabbiata, e che quella rabbia era per me. Stava parlando tra sè, quindi quello che disse ad alta voce fu solo il frammento di una conversazione più...
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout.
I tried to write a story about a reunion between my father and myself in heaven one time. An early draft of this book in fact began that way. I hoped in the story to become a really good friend of his...
He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my en...
For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors—mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law wer...
Bodies lay everywhere, in grotesque attitudes of violent death, but manifesting the miracle of life in a snore, a mutter, the flight of a bubble from the lips.
Americans . . . are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.