Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.

Being a practiced liar doesnt mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all its that which gives their lies such wide eyed conviction.

All good things pass away.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

My life has been a continuous fulfillment of dreams. It appears that everything I saw and did has a new, and perhaps, more significant meaning, every time I see it. The earth is good. It is a privilege to live thereon.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

All of us want to have meaning in our lives and want to feel like we're doing something that makes a difference. I believe we're doing that in the Justice Department.

To many, Homer may appear lazy and a loser, but he's just much misguided. He's boorish, sure, but well meaning and, I guess, the one thing we have in common is the pursuit of lousy diets.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

Our lives are programmed at conception and are endowed with purpose and meaning.

The fountain of youth with the youthful young musician is one meaning, and the fountain of youth with the youthful energy of the leader is another meaning.