TuesdayJul 21, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that the wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freashly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God ' I said to myself, 'it's the Children's Crusade.'
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
We are what we pretend to be, but we better be very careful what we pretend.
There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion .... I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
Human beings will be happier not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.
How embarassing to be human.
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
... hummings and clickings could be heardthe sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
I'd rather have written 'Cheers' than anything I've written.
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
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