Quotes About Author

The practice community is not a refuge for souls saddened by disappointment.

The word "body" here simply means a collection of energy—a body of energy. Modern science tells us that everything we perceive is energy.

Jede Existenz ist ein Milderungsgrund, geehrter Herr.

Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.

Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don't have any other choice, Glenn

Die beste Methode, sich von einem Schriftstellerwerk zu befreien, das einen gleich in was für einer Hinsicht nicht mehr in Ruhe läßt, sei es, weil man es am höchsten schätzt, sei es, daß man es haßt, ist, seinen Erzeuger kennenzulernen. Wir gehen zum Erzeuger eines literarischen Werkes und sind es los, habe ich zu Gambetti gesagt.

We had taken him for a Norwegian ship's captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe.

Trials wean us from this world and prompt us to look to the happiness of the next world.

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?

T here's no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet.

A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning.

reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Different: no guilty party exists in the narrative (unless you count the author, who is present everywhere and nowhere).

God's holiness without God's love would be unbearable. God's love without God's holiness would be unjust. God's wisdom found a way to bring them congruently together. It involved a cross

the unmistakable miracle: there is a consensus.

Oh, he was a decent-enough high school student, good grades and well-liked, but his test scores were nothing to write home about. He might as well have Christmas-treed the math test.

The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.

the Church, in fact, was the matrix that produced the university, the nest whence it took flight." 31

To be attacked by a Gore Vidal, or an H.L. Mencken, one of the great wordsmiths of American criticism, while surely unpleasant, must have been oddly exhilarating for the poor souls on the receiving end. I, on the other hand, have the more dubious and prosaic distinction of being a regular target of Ian Millhiser.

It's one thing to describe someone as a voice crying in the wilderness, but that doesn't quite capture Laurence Vance and his work. Vance is a voice crying in a soundproof sarcophagus on the moon.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.

Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!