20th-century Author Quotes

J. K. Rowling

Bertolt Brecht

Pablo Neruda

Isaac Asimov

William Faulkner

Aldous Huxley

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

José Bergamín

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

György Konrád

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again.

Camilo José Cela

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No day but today!

Jonathan Larson

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

William Faulkner

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

In November, 1964 when I was a patient at the Mayo Clinic I though seriously about killing myself.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.