Quotes By Author | Novelguide

"Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way."

"I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education."

"Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up."

"Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it."

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

"The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion."

"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."

"Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap."

"How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it."

"Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail."

"I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good."

"When love is not madness, it is not love."

"The closer one gets to the top, the more one finds there is no "top.""

"Acting is a matter of giving away secrets."

"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."

"Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge."

"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it."

"One can imagine the government's problem. This is all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?"

"In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance."

"You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions"

"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."

"When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks."

"Life is a long lesson in humility."

"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person."

"There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time."

"Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages."

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

"It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence."

"Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger."