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

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.

Boldness and decision command, often even in evil, the respect and concurrence of mankind.

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

A great book is like great evil.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.

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

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.

But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.

We all agree that we've got to bring these terrorists to justice and to make sure that they're never allowed to perpetrate such an evil act as they did. And so all of us are dealing with that. We know that the President has the authority to go to war under the War Powers Act.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.