Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Our life is full of empty space.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
A secret is powerful when it is empty.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Translation is the art of failure.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Libraries can take the place of God.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
We like lists because we don't want to die.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I write what I write.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Human beings are religious animals.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.
 -- Umberto Eco
%
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Dream in a pragmatic way.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Every man's memory is his private literature.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Experience teaches only the teachable.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The proper study of mankind is books.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
 -- Aldous Huxley
%
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
 -- George Orwell
%
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
 -- George Orwell
%
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
 -- George Orwell
%
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
 -- George Orwell
%
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
 -- George Orwell
%
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
 -- George Orwell
%
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
 -- George Orwell
%
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
 -- George Orwell
%
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
 -- George Orwell
%
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
 -- George Orwell
%
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
 -- George Orwell
%
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
 -- George Orwell
%
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
 -- George Orwell
%
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
 -- George Orwell
%
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
 -- George Orwell
%
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
 -- George Orwell
%
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
 -- George Orwell
%
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
 -- George Orwell
%
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
 -- George Orwell
%
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
 -- George Orwell
%
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
 -- George Orwell
%
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
 -- George Orwell
%
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
 -- George Orwell
%
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
 -- George Orwell
%
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
 -- George Orwell
%
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
 -- George Orwell
%
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
 -- George Orwell
%
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
 -- George Orwell
%
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
 -- George Orwell
%
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
 -- George Orwell
%
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
 -- George Orwell
%
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
 -- George Orwell
%
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
 -- George Orwell
%
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
 -- George Orwell
%
Big Brother is watching you.
 -- George Orwell
%
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
 -- George Orwell
%
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
 -- George Orwell
%
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
 -- George Orwell
%
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
 -- George Orwell
%
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
 -- George Orwell
%
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
 -- George Orwell
%
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
 -- George Orwell
%
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
 -- George Orwell
%
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
 -- George Orwell
%
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
 -- George Orwell
%
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
 -- George Orwell
%
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
 -- George Orwell
%
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
 -- George Orwell
%
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
 -- George Orwell
%
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
 -- George Orwell
%
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
 -- George Orwell
%
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
 -- George Orwell
%
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
 -- George Orwell
%
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
 -- George Orwell
%
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
 -- George Orwell
%
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
 -- George Orwell
%
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
 -- George Orwell
%
Four legs good, two legs bad.
 -- George Orwell
%
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
 -- George Orwell
%
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
 -- George Orwell
%
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
 -- George Orwell
%
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
 -- George Orwell
%
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
 -- George Orwell
%
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
 -- George Orwell
%
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
 -- George Orwell
%
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
 -- George Orwell
%
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
 -- George Orwell
%
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
 -- George Orwell
%
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
 -- George Orwell
%
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
 -- George Orwell
%
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
 -- George Orwell
%
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
 -- George Orwell
%
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
 -- George Orwell
%
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
 -- George Orwell
%
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
 -- George Orwell
%
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
 -- George Orwell
%
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
 -- George Orwell
%
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
 -- George Orwell
%
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
 -- George Orwell
%
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
 -- George Orwell
%
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
 -- George Orwell
%
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
 -- George Orwell
%
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
 -- George Orwell
%
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
 -- George Orwell
%
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
 -- George Orwell
%
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
 -- George Orwell
%
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
 -- George Orwell
%
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
 -- George Orwell
%
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
 -- George Orwell
%
Good writing is like a windowpane.
 -- George Orwell
%
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
 -- George Orwell
%
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
 -- George Orwell
%
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
 -- George Orwell
%
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
 -- George Orwell
%
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
 -- George Orwell
%
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
 -- George Orwell
%
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
 -- George Orwell
%
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
 -- George Orwell
%
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The Martians are always coming.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The core of my writing is not art but truth.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
 -- Philip K. Dick
%
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Freedom without limits is just a word.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't die with an unfinished book.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The thing is, 'Discworld' had been going on for a very long time, and I've written children's books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I'd do is I'd franchise it to myself.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I like being a writer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
 -- Terry Pratchett
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Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. 'The Lord of the Rings' is intensely... landscaped. But 'Discworld' is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
A person's a person, no matter how small.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Fun is good.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Adults are obsolete children.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You're in pretty good shape for the shape you are in.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I've heard there are troubles of more than one kind; some come from ahead, and some come from behind. But I've brought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see; now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Only you can control your future.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I meant what I said and I said what I meant.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
'The Lorax' book was intended to be propaganda.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
When at last we are sure, You've been properly pilled, Then a few paper forms, Must be properly filled. So that you and your heirs, May be properly billed.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I am not a consecutive writer.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I'm doing, I always tell myself, 'You can do better than this.'
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
You make 'em, I amuse 'em.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Every once in a while, I get mad. 'The Lorax' came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull... In 'The Lorax,' I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.
 -- Dr. Seuss
%
I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.
 -- Dr. Seuss
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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.
 -- Isaac Asimov
%
Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Man makes holy what he believes.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
 ~ Ernest Renan
%
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Never get out of bed before noon.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
 -- Charles Bukowski
%
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
 -- Charles Bukowski
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I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I wish being a beekeeper, which I am, gave you a free pass on the carbon footprint, but it doesn't.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I've known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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What I'd love to do is every now and then go, 'Oh my God, I've got this amazing idea for 'Doctor Who.'
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn't do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn't do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Make good art.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Also, I've already won all the awards.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked... that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The joy of doing 'Sandman' was doing a comic and telling people, 'No, it has an end,' at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you'd finished.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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You know, it's weird being interviewed! Because the weird thing about being interviewed is you get asked these questions that you've never thought about, and you find out what you think as you answer.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
 -- Neil Gaiman
%
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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Oh, tweeting prolifically is the most easy thing in the world. Tweeting prolifically is like somebody saying, 'Boy, you're a really good walker around,' you know. It's not really hard.
 -- Neil Gaiman
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The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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What we don't understand we can make mean anything.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Men want to make the best use of time and want to see how something can inform them and give them a stronger sense of power.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Masochism is a valuable job skill.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If we can prove an afterlife, then we have less pressure to make our physical life last forever.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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The answer is there is no answer.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I just don't want to die without a few scars.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
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I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There will always be an underground.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I like to get people moving and jumping. I think it's good to add more emotion and chaos.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think America is just so in love with conflict.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
'Romance' is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it's stupid.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Portland is quickly becoming one of those lovely, lush Third World countries where kinda-rich people retire with their money.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I am enormously uncool. I've made a cottage industry of being uncool. And I'm fine with that.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
David Fincher is a genius.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My writing process isn't a very organized thing.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My parents divorced about the same time the movie 'The Parent Trap' came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I'm only confrontational with my friends.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Every author has to eventually write a food book.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
Once I start writing, I can't stop.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
My books are all fantastically sentimental.
 -- Chuck Palahniuk
%
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Every man's memory is his private literature.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Experience teaches only the teachable.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Dream in a pragmatic way.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The proper study of mankind is books.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
  ~ Aldous Huxley
%
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The more one judges, the less one loves.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love is the poetry of the senses.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
What is art? Nature concentrated.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
  ~ Honore de Balzac
%
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
  ~ Terry Pratchett, Jingo
%
If you want to conquer fear, don't sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The expression a woman wears on her face is far more important than the clothes she wears on her back.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it... that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
We all have possibilities we don't know about. We can do things we don't even dream we can do.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Applause is a receipt, not a bill.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
There is only one way... to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping .
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Only the prepared speaker deserves to be confident.
--  Dale Carnegie
%
Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said.
--  Dale Carnegie
