Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the …
Joan Miró On Creativity
Joan Miró (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later…For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.
Katherine Hepburn On Satisfaction
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun. If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.
Adrienne Rich On Poets
Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) I have been a poet of the oppositional imagination, meaning that I don't think my only argument is with myself. My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night, rather than rehearse the landlocked details of …
George Orwell On Fascism
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.
Alice Koller On Writing
Alice Koller The only “doing” that’s the same every day is that most writers go to the same desk and chair that we sat in and worked at yesterday, and that the “working” is with the same computer, and the same pen, or the same kind of pen, each with a different color of ink. …
John Steinbeck On Literature
John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by …
Tim Kreider On Solitude
Tim Kreider (February 25, 1967 -) As with most artists, my fondest worldly goal is to be left alone: I dream of an empire the size of my apartment.
Carolyn Forché On Poets
Carolyn Forché (April 28, 1950 - ) The poets are more expected to be intellectuals and to have an active interest in history and politics and everything going on. They’re not expected to be sequestered in a literary culture. They’re not expected to have no opinions about events in the world. They’re expected to have …
E E Cummings On Being Yourself
e.e. cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) To be “nobody but yourself” — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Nell Freudenberger On Writing
Nell Freudenberger I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn’t have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private — a comforting thought. If you can make that distinction in your head, you can write just the way you always did, …
Robert Penn Warren On The Self
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905–September 15, 1989) The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself.
Charles Simic On Poetry
Charles Simic (May 09, 1938 -) There's no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one's pocket would serve as well as any university.
Marie Howe On Singularity
Marie Howe Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? …
Tao Writer On Love
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) Love opens me to myself as well as to the beloved. For it is true, I must love myself before I can receive and return the love of another. From my adventures in love, I learned most of all that love is fulfilling the needs of the other person …
Morpheus On The Matrix
Morpheus aka Laurence Fishburne Film The Matrix Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter …
Herbert B Swope On Failure
Herbert B Swope (January 5, 1882 – June 20, 1958) I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula of failure - which is try to please everybody.
Simone Weil On Attention
Simone Weil ( February 03, 1909 – August 24, 1943) Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
John Kerry On Free Speech
John Kerry (December 11, 1943 -) Democracy relies on free speech. Yes, say anything you want, but it relies even more on the speech being truthful. It is the truth after all that sets us free. And the truth is — no, this is not a normal time.
Georgia O’Keeffe On Friendship
Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) Nobody sees a flower, really. It is so small. It takes time. We haven't time and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
LeBron James On Race
LeBron James (December 30, 1984 -) No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is tough.
Thomas Pesquet On Simplicity
Thomas Pesquet (February 27, 1978 -) It takes all of this technology to come up here and understand the simplicity of things. From here, it’s really difficult to understand borders, wars and hate...I can’t wait to be on Earth again, but I will certainly miss the view. *French astronaut on his return to earth after …
Barbara Ras On You Can’t Have It All
Barbara Ras (1949 -) But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the …
Eleanor Roosevelt On Integrity
Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) It's your life – but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what …
Walker Percy On The Journey
Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) There is only one thing I can do. Listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along.
Christopher Morley On Success
Christopher Morley (May 05, 1890 – March 28, 1957) There is only one success... to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Calvin & Hobbes On Creativity
Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbes: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic.
C S Lewis On Friendship
C S Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
Elizabeth Bowen On Writing
Elizabeth Bowen (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It's a sign, I suppose, of life's decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few …
Aldous Huxley On Nothing But
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) Materialism and mentalism — the philosophies of “nothing but.” How wearily familiar we have become with that “nothing but space, time, matter and motion,” that “nothing but sex,” that “nothing but economics”! And the no less intolerant “nothing but spirit,” “nothing but consciousness,” “nothing but psychology” …
Jorge Luis Borges On Paradise
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
