Quotes About Individuality

I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me. (Paris Review Interview)

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado. JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

It is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world.

Ne kadar çok insan var, diye düÅŸündü. Bizim gibi milyarlarca insan var, ne kadar fazla. Kimse kimseyi bilmez. Yabanc?lar gelip seni rahats?z ederler. Yabanc?lar gelir, yüreÄŸini kesip al?rlar.

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings, or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

Well,' she said, 'I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

He had seen her painted sign by the road: Skin Illustration! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic!

Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual", of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Usted no es como los demás. He visto a unos cuantos. Lo sé. Cuando hablo usted me mira. Anoche, cuando dije algo sobre la luna, usted la miró. Los otros nunca harían eso. Los otros se alejarían, dejándome con la palabra en la boca. O me amenazarían. Nadie tiene ya tiempo para nadie.

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

When did it start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.

Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy.

My dear, when you are as old as I, they won't call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It's always 'Mrs. ' Young People don't like to call you 'Helen. ' It seems much too flip.

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.

Oh, they don't miss me, she said. I'm anti-social, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking about things like this. She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?

We should not judge our books by their covers, some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped

It doesn't have to be the greatest but it does have to be you.

Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel

Nothing extraordinary about me except I'm fifty-four, which is always extraordinary to the man inside it.

There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it's only in his head, to get by himself in his own world.