Quotes About Author

having a line of coloured sand drawn around Phnom Penh to give the city magical protection.

was one of the worst—arguably the worst—intelligence failure in modern history.

So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight.

it is only the unthinking mind that finds anything unthinkable. To use the word is just to show your membership card in the society of morons.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien

The very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination and evil in some of us can inspire the heroic imagination in others.

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn't changed much.

C'est lui qui reprend la parole : et vous ? Vous allez écrire sur cette histoire, n'est-ce pas ? Vous n'allez pas pouvoir vous en empêcher. Je répète que je n'écris jamais sur ma vie, que je suis un romancier. Il sourit : encore un de vos mensonges, pas vrai ? Je souris en retour.

Pauvre petit Houellebecq, tout seul, avec sa valise trop lourde.)

No war in American history is in greater need of a politically incorrect—another word for honest—treatment than the Vietnam War, because the people who misreported the war, hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now tout its supposed "lessons" are the very same people who created "political correctness" in the first place.

No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly.

But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it.

stronger than he looked but it was still a strain to drag the drop cloth–wrapped corpse through the house and out the back

Why he was going to check on some child who more than likely was a zombie playing ball in an empty grocery store, was beyond me. It

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

I hear you're a writer,' said 2040..."What are you writing about?' Not liking to discuss my writing with strangers, I had been privately auditioning possible conversation stoppers, but I didn't think that I would ever have the nerve to use one. But now, in the most awkward of situations, it seemed appropriate. 'Actually, I'm writing a biography,' I responded casually. 'About a man in Alaska who makes foie gras from penguins.

There was a brass bedstead with a tan spread, on which slept a big, tiger-striped yellow cat.

Sanity," she says to the ground, "is a mutual agreement between folks trying to control their world.

In a world of inhumanity, war and terrorism, American citizenship is a very precious possession.

But it speaks for an inner world— and again this is evident in Murakami— that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

And dead an epoch of our existence, which in a world destined to humiliate us was moral light and resistance.