SundayMay 11, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.
Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate ... if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?
Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? ... Like a marriage from which love has gone.... And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
This Gun for Hire.
Our Man in Havana.
Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
The Third Man.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadnt thought about. At that moment hes alive and you leave it to him.
Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.
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