Quotes About Author

I either write the books or sell the jewels , and I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.

Bay Area real estate is far more likely than a bad LSD trip to drive you to psychosis.

When I die I hope to go to heaven--whatever that is--and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

It is a sin to write this.

Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.

writing is serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it.

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance.

You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line--it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.

It is a sin to think words no others think

It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it.

Man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.

The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility.

Am I finally addressing a sentient being?

There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities. —La Rochefoucauld

In this world," he reminded a French friend, "it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.

Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft

The right-minded were those who insisted on colonial liberties. Treason, he held, consisted of the failure to defend those liberties.

There is all the same some truth to the allegation that — as one intimate put it — the American Revolution could be blamed on the Harvard College library.3