One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.

Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.

I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

That is the consolation of a little mind you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

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

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.