For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it & sometimes break in two. I've known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog.
Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless...
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from...
Creativity is a continual surprise.
Surprise is where creativity comes in.
You don't have to turn on the TV set. You don't have to work on the Internet. It's up to you.
I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
— И ти обичаш да плачеш, но не си го признаваш. Наплаче ли се човек, всичко му минава.
You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instr...
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.
You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead
Where do we go from here? Would books help us? Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: t...
They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not a...
They peered at him with their shining honey warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime...
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
So the carnival steams by, shakes ANY tree: it rains jackasses.