Quotes About Author

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.

and no less intellectual than Nero.

the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you've reread him)

So here is a simple rule of thumb (a heuristic): to estimate the quality of research, take the caliber of the highest detractor, or the caliber of the lowest detractor whom the author answers in print—whichever is lower.

I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion

Adding the because makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely.

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Time is an eraser rather than a builder, and a good one at breaking the fragile—whether buildings or ideas.

the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.

A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about - and the reader is no fool. So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.Yet some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.

Two little provincial intellectuals, that was what they were, and that is the dreariest and oddest thing that can exist on earth.

it seems desperately attractive to be unrooted and breathing nothing but your own solitude

You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.

La grande courtisane, la petite sainte.

I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

Not fear of this responsibility but surrender to the fear is a chief contributor to the subversion of self-esteem.

There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them.

That little baggage hath witchcraft in her.

Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.