Quotes By Author | Novelguide

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

"The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain; to show them we love them not when we feel like it, but when they do."

"Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots."

"As experience widens, one begins to see how much upon a level all human things are."

"Surfing on the Internet is like sex; everyone boasts about doing more than they actually do. But in the case of the Internet, it's a lot more."

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."

"A budget tells us what we can't afford, but it doesn't keep us from buying it."

"Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me."

"All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

"Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid."

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers."

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."

"Everybody wants to eat at the government's table, but nobody wants to do the dishes."

"Nothing encourages creativity like the chance to fall flat on one's face."

"A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of a forest. I, too, will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high."

"The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials."

"Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them."

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."

"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

"You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine."

"Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper."

"If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them."

"Failure is success if we learn from it."

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."

"The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?"