American Author Quotes

A feller's glad to be a friend, Out fishin'. A helpin' hand he'll always lend, Out fishin' The brotherhood of rod and line An' sky an' stream is always fine; Men come real close to God's design, Out fishin'. A feller isn't plotting schemes, Out fishin'. He's only busy with his dreams, Out fishin' His livery is a coat of tan; His creed, to do the best he can; A feller's always mostly man Out fishin'.

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk-away from any open flames-to remind yourself that if you don't write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

Marriage is something that should be tried at least once. It's educational.

To know a little less and to understand a little more: that, it seems to me, is our greatest need.

James Ramsey Ullman

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.'

To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

Elizabeth Robins

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

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Robert Wilson (director)

Love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.

Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different...

His leaving had been like snipping off the end of a rope - leaving two unraveling strands.

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.

Painters are so bitchy. Magritte told Miró that Kandinsky had feet of Klee.

Told to Ned Sherrin

If my hair gets any frizzier, I'll shave it to the scalp. Or light it on fire. Whichever is easier.

Oh! sing it in the light of freedom's morn,
Tho' tyrant wars have made the earth a grave;
The good, the great, and true, are, if so born,
And so with slaves, chains do not make the slave!

Albery Allson Whitman

under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

The view from the window, particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.

Chris Bachelder

I am a human being and an artist: I really, simply, surely am.

You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.

That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

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