Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

All change is not growth as all movement is not forward.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.

I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.