Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

You lose your manners when you are poor.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night matter not at all.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.