For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

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

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that it ceases to be fiction.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing a stone a bone a stick a receptacle for Gilbeys gin a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I didn't know at the time that the energy that I was giving off was like a battle Emcee.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

That a great battle must soon be fought no one could doubt; but, in the apparent and perhaps real absence of plan on the part of Lee, it was impossible to foretell the precise scene of the encounter.

Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United States has ever before waged, for the success of democracy in Iraq is a crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

Christianity is a battle not a dream.

Our main battle has always been against Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.

From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.

Usually in a battle sequence when a bomb is going off, you forget you're acting.

And then there's all these other creeps that surround your band and suck off you like leeches and try to manipulate you and your business. You have to watch like a hawk. I'm always ready to fight. I see it very much as a battle.

When a battle for suffrage is conducted, it should only be conducted according to socialist principles, and therefore with the demand of universal suffrage for women and men.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.

Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.