20th-century Author Quotes

J. K. Rowling

Bertolt Brecht

Pablo Neruda

Isaac Asimov

William Faulkner

Aldous Huxley

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

One of the main reasons why the sciences are so poor is that they imagine they are so rich. It isn't their job to throw open the door to infinite wisdom but to put a limit to infinite error.

Galileo speaking

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.

Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!

Jeff Smith (chef)

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

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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

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

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

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

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

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

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

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

In the house, and on the street, how many, many feet you meet.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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