Quotes About Author

When he quoted Voltaire's dictum that 'the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity', he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

William Carlos Williams

papers of various shades sticking out from under others, throwing the printing out of line: portrait of all that which we have lost

During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessing of peace.

We ought to recollect ... that a book consists, like man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul.

He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.

Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.

I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.

And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe. (on Mark Twain)

And you came home? To die. Yes. To die? Yes. To die.

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the same and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

Shreve had a brush, so I didn't have to open the bag any more.

The existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing--a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world, even as a form of shamanic journey--described in one of his early books what he called the ontologically secure person.

Writing felt like it justified, barely, my existence -- this extremity of obscurity I had chosen.

all writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge