I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with
I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a hom...
Other people say, Hello or Goodbye! We always say, Excuse me, no matter what we’re doing.’ He threw up his hands. ‘No more apologies! So we’re poor! All right, we’re poor! This is America! And America...
I spoke one time at the Library of Congress, in 1972, or so. A man stood up in the middle of the audience, when I was about halfway through, and he said, What right have you, as leader of America's yo...
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
People who can read and write expertly, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect we might be civilized after all.
Is Doctor Proteus on? said Kroner’s secretary. Doctor Kroner is in. Just a moment, said Katharine. Doctor Proteus, Doctor Kroner is in and will speak to you. All right, I’m on. Doctor Proteus is on th...
I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. Ask any great athlete.
My god-life! who can understand eve one little minute of it? 'don't try' he said 'just pretend you understand.
Lucky me , Lucky mud
Him! Him! Captain Eliot Rosewater–Silver Star, Bronze Star, Soldier's Medal, and Purple Heart with Cluster! Sailing champion! Ski champion! Him! Him! My God–the number of times life has said, 'Yes, ye...
Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.
That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call personality, or maybe even pain.
Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kic...
My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
It was a perfectly good word – until Eliot got hold of it. It’s spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matt...
I thought that was pretty good. So then I disturbed my father at his typewriter, and asked him what my heritage was from his side of the family. I didn’t know then what sperm was, and so wouldn’t unde...