American Author Quotes

In this life you sometimes have to choose between pleasing God and pleasing man. - In the long run, it's better to please God - he's more apt to remember.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.

Elinor Wylie
Elinor Wylie
Only once you destroy who you think you are can you embrace who you truly are

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere...

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

The big picture is that there is no big picture.
That's why we keep painting it.

We dwell within the Milky Way, Our Earth, a paltry little mommet, Suspended in a grand array Of constellation, moon and comet.

Arthur Guiterman
Arthur Guiterman
There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.

Love is the answer, that everyone seeks...Love is the language, that every heart speaks.

The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth.

Hallie Erminie Rives
Hallie Erminie Rives
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.

Edward Albee
Edward Albee
My love for you won't stop with my leaving. Come an evening over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that'll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you.

I read, for the first time, of the Carolina Parakeet-a North American parakeet whose green, yellow and reddish-orange plumage appeared vivacious and altogether quite wonderful. As stunning as I found the hawk-chased conures, this bird astounded me even more. That the Carolina Parakeet was extinct simply added to my amazement.

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in — the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain....

John Ashbery
John Ashbery
Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters when what we want is sun.

As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me,

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

James Dickey
James Dickey
Men want a challenge, but they want a challenge they can win.

Painters are so bitchy. Magritte told Miró that Kandinsky had feet of Klee.
Told to Ned Sherrin

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'