Quotes About Author

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.

this was an outstanding family subject in our real life.

Flirting with madness is one thing. But when madness starts flirting back, its time to call the whole thing off.

His ties were the subject of constant speculation...The knots ranged in size from microscopic to a bulky samosa.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.

However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Embarrassed and almost quickly because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven't I been just that: moved?

Is not any other desire but mine insane?

I am through with *not enough* Henceforth I live in the definitive assumption of the Image-repertoire, its triumph.

Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.

And yet, nothing can escape being put into question by History; not even good writing.

The prolific Hamilton was now writing pseudonymous commentaries on his own pseudonymous essays.

His eloquence . . . seemed to require opposition to give it its full force.

Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a stupendous 120,000 copies by year's end.

After Seabury rebutted "A Full Vindication," Hamilton struck back with "The Farmer Refuted," an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775.

task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

By the end of four years at West Point, he had capitulated to the tyranny of the clerical error and adopted Ulysses S. Grant as his new moniker for life.

I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war. Alex. Hamilton.

In closing, Washington referred to the character of Jesus, "the Divine author of our blessed religion.

The Federalist has been extolled as both a literary and political masterpiece. Theodore Roosevelt commented "that it is on the whole the greatest book" dealing with practical politics.

if Clinton was taken prisoner "it would be our misfortune, since the British government could not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.