Quotes About Joy

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously. [ Writer's Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer's Digest , February 1976)]

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.

The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do.

Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I'm not happy, I'm not happy.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

It shouldn't work. It shouldn't be magic. You shouldn't weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do.

The Animal does not question lif. It lives. It's very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

Writing is not a serious business. It's a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say 'Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…', you know. Now, to hell with that. It's not work. If it's work, stop and do something else.

And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.

Happy! Of all the nonsense.

RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH! For its very sound meant rolling in sweet fields with roistering chestnut mares, mouths bearded with grass, plunging your head fathoms deep in trough water so the sea poured cavernously through your head. RELISH!

In your life, did you know enthusiasm?' If the answer is yes you enter the sky. If no, you fall to burn in the pit.

I been figuring, what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, 'Yes, sir, that's happiness.

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wine-glasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. (Season of Disbelief)

The word on the jar was RELISH. And he was glad he had decided to live.

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.