20th-century Author Quotes

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

I fear freedom. I, above all, fear the freedom that is above all feardom.

Giannina Braschi

I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.

Richard Brautigan

Apollinaire asserted that Chirico's first paintings were done under the influence of kinesthetic disorders (migraines, colic, etc.)

Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.

Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out The problem is WHITE PEOPLE. Dworkin said, The problem is MEN. And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt.

It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.

Gwendolyn Brooks

But there were alternative media outlets. Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans tuned them out.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

FACT: The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage.

In the course of our eternal existence, we spend infinitely more time in the spirit world on the other side than we spend in the human world on earth.

At dawn, a railwaywoman
On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain
An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe
A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles
A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat:
A cameo of unrehearsed perfection.

People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the ones worth having for your friends.

Appropriate action means to advance your own goals, without unintentional harm to anyone else.

The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it.

Robert Brustein

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?

We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.

Marcus Buckingham

Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness....

William F. Buckley, Jr.

When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, "He didn't hit me."

Lois McMaster Bujold

Oh, what a marvelous affirmation of evolutionary theory! Oh, what a great chain extends from a dog to Mendeleev the chemist!

Mikhail Bulgakov

Patient, dramatic, serious, genial,
From over to over the game goes on,
Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial,
Civilisation under the sun.