The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I didn't think; I experimented.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Every dogma has its day.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

Bath twice a day to be really clean once a day to be passably clean once a week to avoid being a public menace.

If you believe in an unseen Christ you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Laugh and the world laughs with you snore and you sleep alone.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community

Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore, and you sleep alone!

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Common sense should tell us that there is no reason for civilians to have access to easily concealable handguns with the capability to shoot through body armor.

I believe that Canadians have the common sense to see that a better future cannot be built on fragmentation.

If a man has common sense, he has all the sense there is.

Common sense tells us that we should focus our resources to benefit children, teachers and taxpayers by keeping dollars in the classroom.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

A great deal has been said about my commitment not to raise taxes. It's a core value - it's common sense - it's important to keeping and growing jobs - and it's mainstream!

A balanced program for tax reform based upon the common sense idea of lowering taxes out of surplus revenues.

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.

As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul.

Common sense tells us that this explosion of media sources should eliminate any concern over a lack of diversity of views in the marketplace and competition.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.