Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

I was so happy,-Eric Miller

I am not now, and never have been, a girl friend of Henry Kissinger.

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Ah yes, yes, once in a while indulge...spree and pee...a look at the girls and a brawl...not too bloody...ring around the rosie...you know...shake the bugs out of the rug.

I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, nanve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

It is now 10 p.m. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?;"Elizabeth Carpenter

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to enduring fact of mystery.

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

There was definitely frustration about Henri's non-appearance. We weren't happy about it.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.

When you forget to eat you know you're alive.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

The Millers are happy to have the litigation behind them. No amount of money ever makes losing your liver worth it, certainly.

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

You have to type to live, right?;"Chris Miller, hardcore geek.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.

No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?;"Thomas Henry Huxley

Do you want me to suck yours?;"Janet Henry, referring to a lollipop

Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.

Sex is one of the 9 reasons for reincarnation, the other 8 are unimportant.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

My friends, on the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little ditch of understanding which they had dug for themselves. They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world.

I have no money, no resources, and no hope. I am the happiest man alive.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets -- we remember only.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

Actors die so loud.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.