“I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.”

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Human behavior is timeless.

The writer’s object is – or should be – to hold the reader’s attention.

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.

When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

I’m really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while.

I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”

I’m kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Minister and writer Barbara Kaufmann has addressed the subject of guerrilla decontextualization on both the ‘Voices Compassionate Education’ website and on ‘Inner Michael’,

The writing of the script is a continual process. There’s the first draft and then many, many re-writes here and there.

The literary work is more mystical, because it’s only the writer, and connected to something inside.

I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing, and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works.