20th-century Author Quotes

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

This was a good beginning. All the outmoded rules of the hospital were broken. Minds which had been tied down by subservience to foreign experience were now set in motion. People began to speak, to think and to act boldly. A new world opened in front of them. They knew that what they were doing now was something unprecedented which doctors in capitalist countries had not been able to do. They were engaged in a battle to save lives and as the scope of the battle became wider an increasing number of people were drawn in. Later on when a difficulty occurred in the course of treatment they solicited the opinions of many doctors both within and without the hospital, depending on the wisdom of the many to tide over one crisis after another.

The writer doesn't push story into us, he withholds information in order that we draw his story out of ourselves.

David Baboulene

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi

It is in the nature of theoretical science that there can be no such thing as certainty. A theory is only "true" for as long as the majority of the scientific community maintain the view that the theory is the one best able to explain the observations.

After she wrote her first two novels:

I thought I'd walk down the street and everybody would know I had written a book. But nobody took any notice of these two novels, and I stopped writing. I felt uneasy for about three years.

Beryl Bainbridge

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

You truly are an extraordinary man, Mr Sandeen. Nobody I know counts weeks. That is absolutely marvelous.

Marjaneh Bakhtiari

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

R. Scott Bakker

Painters have often taught writers how to see.

I'm never happier than when I can write about draining swimming pools and abandoned hotels.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths.

There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like.

I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

Life is a slow suicide, and it is happening to every intellectual.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi

On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all.
Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you're fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs.