"This convinces me of something which I have suspected for a long time, namely that scientists are simpletons who happen to have a knack with test-tubes, but possess no real intelligence at all."

"That knuckle-end of England -- that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur."

"However hard a young man may try to live up to his Scout Oath, and to keep his love on a purely sentimental plane, girls don't encourage him to do so. And just as well, too. There is a point beyond which purity should not be allowed to go."

"Someone you hate can give you a hard-on."

"Life of the party,
Musical chairs,
Everyone's willing,
But nobody cares."

"Didn't your mother teach you anything about the facts of life? Don't you know that everybody kisses everybody in rose gardens?"

"Give me chastity, but not yet."

"My husband is German. Every night I get dressed up like Poland and he invades me."

"I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child five years later."

"I wanted to be a virgin one time, but I couldn't keep it up."

"Boredom has all the same letters as bedroom."

"Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or a railway station; suppose we never allowed the word 'train' to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered more or less neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse."

"Another obsession of the Evangelicals was the suppression of Vice, by which, of course, they meant anything related to sex."

"Sometimes the Divine commands have been curiously interpreted. For example, we are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays."

"Tell me, ye divines, which is the most virtuous man, he who begets twenty bastards, or he who sacrifices an hundred thousand lives?"

"Only he with the hobbled foot fully knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can apprehend what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us. That we in your sinful souls can even imagine charity -- we may not always be able to practice charity, but that in this world we can even imagine it at all! That act of daring requires the greatest talent ..."

"It was the opinion of the poet Calverley, expressed in his immortal Ode to Tobacco, that there is no heaviness of soul which will not vanish beneath the influence of a quiet smoke."

"They tell us every day we should never smoke, it's bad for your lungs, it's bad for your chest, it stunts your growth, and they sit by the fire puffing away."

"When the oppressed rise and start setting about the oppressor, their fury is always formidable. One noticed this in the French Revolution."

"The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God."

"Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or to understand what he sees?"

"Our destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

"But I did not give up the idea of my journey. I was merely lonesome for someone brave enough to undertake it with me."

"Anybody can dream. And if you take a herb -- well, even the butcher boy at his meat counter will have a dream after eating peyote. The real vision has to come out of your own juices. It is not a dream; it is very real."

"That hour began my wanderings. Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit."

"He who has once been a pilgrim must always be ready to move on, to set forth on his journeying again. It is of no use to say, 'No longer. I'm no longer a pilgrim.'"

"I am no wino or pishko, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn't be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man."

"It is our spiritual duty to pray in the morning, to pray in the evening, to call people together in joy, to eat together, to be happy human beings together."

"If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world."

"All life is suffering."

"Suffering in human life is proportioned to human strength. We will not pretend to say that God always apportions to a man's capability of endurance the anguish he permits him to suffer; such, indeed, would not be exact, since God permits the existence of death, which is sometimes the only refuge open to those who are too closely pressed, -- too bitterly afflicted, so far as the body is concerned. Suffering is proportioned to strength in this sense, -- that the weak suffer more, where the trial is the same, than the strong."

   "So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches toward any small chink of light that I thought I saw. In major issues I never had any choice and therefore the word regret had in my life no application.
   "As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark."

"I stumble toward my grave confused and hurt and hungry . . . "

"Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing."

"She followed the pain as it took her deeper inside herself -- it was giving her an inside! An inside, she thought, is a terrible thing to have. It took her to a core, a heart within her physical heart. This pain wasn't content with burning her fur and her flesh and her blood, it wanted to eat up her soul! So a soul was something you found only as you lost it!"

"The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind of a man to all that is hidden from others."

"Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth."

"I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland."

"Television has educated an entire generation of Americans to believe that the normal way of reacting to a slight is by punching someone in the face."

"Entertainment is a thing of the past. Today we got television."

"I suppose if all the scruples I've overcome in my time were laid end to end, they would reach from London to Glasgow."

"The best way to get the better of temptation is just to yield to it."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation."

"I have always found the truth an excellent thing to deviate from."

"A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers in himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical."

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"Whoever invented the phrase 'the naked truth' had perceived an important connection. Nakedness is shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth."

"I have suppressed a number of incidents which actually happened, because I did not, upon mature reflection, find them in consonance with my nature as I like to think it is -- they were lies told about me by the slinking facts of life."

"Never lie, and never let anyone cause you to lie. Truth, or the pursuit of it, is all we have."

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."

"I said, 'So, you folks believe in astral projection?' They said, 'If something's true, you don't need to believe in it.'"

"Truth intervenes -- it is the bane of stories."

"The opposite of an ordinary truth is a non-truth; but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth."

"People are always talking to you about truth. Everybody always know what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something, and they got a supply in the car or something. Well, what you learn as you get older is, there ain't no truth. All there is, is bullshit - pardon my vulgarity here - layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life, like, when you get older, is you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and that's your bullshit."

"Moreover, 'fact' doesn't mean 'absolute certainty'; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world."

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

"'He hates being laughed at. I know,' said Polly reflectively, 'because I've tried.'"

"It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded of the people."

"The man with the best job in the country is the Vice President. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, 'How's the President?'"

"My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

"Therefore I say: know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."

"A perfect general, like Plato's Republic, is a figment of the imagination"

"The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way."

"Boys, when you see the enemy, fire and then run. And as I am a little lame, I'll run now."

"In war you may be killed or wounded. But people are killed and wounded every day on our roads and we don't talk about the horror of driving. The horror of war is not what it does to the human body (which anyway it probably does only once if at all) but what it does to the human spirit. It is the sight (and sound and smell) of the dead and the injured, the fear that what has happened to them will happen to you, together with all the feelings of revulsion and despair aroused by the human carnage and general destruction that go to make war's horror."

"Wit is aggressive and therefore masculine; at the same time, it's waspish and therefore feminine. Therefore, witty people are queer."

"Female beauty is an important minor sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind."

"Hypatia, like all girls who intend to be good wives, made it a practice to look on any suggestions thrown out by her future lord and master as fatuous and futile."

"All young men greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another."

"There is something still more to be dreaded than a Jesuit and that is a Jesuitess."

"I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce."

"Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it."

"Yes, indeed, madam, I am a great admirer of female beauty, particularly when, as in your case, it is partnered with a gossamer wit."

"She smiled in a steely sort of way, like one of those women in the Old Testament who used to go about driving spikes into people's heads."

"Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you."

"The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."

"No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it's only a question of degree."

"Murmur ye at mine anointed because she is a woman? Who made man and woman, you, or I? If I made her to live, may I not make her to reign?"

"I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be the master of my own time and being content to force the content of a whole life into blanks that had to be filled out."

"I'm ashamed of what I do, it's so dumb, it's so dull, so routine, uncreative and underpaid. What I do, what we all do in my office is just what they do in all others. Charter a helicopter and fly low around New York peeking in the windows of the taller buildings, and you'll see that we've built twenty-odd bridges and tunnels in order to fill Manhattan with people in offices passing pieces of paper around."

"Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Boney fingers."

"They regarded working for another as, under any circumstances, 'veliki zalum' (great tyrrany). I asked what was the objection supposing one was well paid. They replied, the master told them to go here and fetch straw, and to go there and sell hay when they did not want to do it -- when to-morrow would do as well."

"I've never worried about making a living, but I've done thinking about making a life."

"Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots, were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle."

"The idea of anyone being so brutal as to make you work! the all-in champion of the lilies of the field. The king of the toil-not-nor-spinners. I never heard of such a thing. Why, it's enough to send you into a nervous decline."

"It was my policy never to spend more than half my wages so as not to have to work for more than half my days on earth."

"I didn't want a steady job in an office or factory. I thought myself too good for that, because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people. I trained myself to need and want as little as could be so that I wouldn't have to work except when I felt like it."

"Le livre, c'est moi."

"This must be like making cheese. What is made in a day is eaten in a moment."

"I discovered the unhappy fact that I have nothing to say."

"The whole trouble with these fellows like Sippy, who go in for writing, is that they develop the artistic temperament, and you never know when it is going to break out."

"It was not just my contract with my publishers, it was that I had things clawing inside of me that must be said."

"I have felt that she could write as well as act, but she seems to believe that writing is 'too hard.' This is definite proof that she knows about writing."

"I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn."

"It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'"

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of somebody's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."

"There is nothing like fury for stimulating the pen. Ask Dante. Ask Juvenal."

"Everything that goes into a novel should advance either the plot or the characterization."

"Maugham was accused of not being a gentleman, which was absurd, for no author worth his salt is a gentleman."

"The literary world is not conducted according to Marquis of Queensberry rules; if you find somebody's private papers, you immediately rootle through them, looking for raw material. This is something non-literary people never understand. They are likely to confuse it with a vulgar, prying nature."

"There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. I expect the liveliest books are written from a combination of all three motives."

"you people who say you admire
my work are always butting in
and taking up my time
how the hell can i get any
serious literary work done
if you keep bothering me
all the time"

"You know as well as I do what authors are. Unbalanced. Unreliable. Fatheads, to a man."

"i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well"

"His task done, his thoughts like those of every author who has ever completed a testing bit of work, turned in the direction of beer."

"Any fool can write a most valuable book by chance, if only he will tell us what he heard and saw with veracity."

"A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exit -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha; but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I fancy."

"In any fiction where the omniscient narrator uses the same language as the characters, there is a loss of tension and a lowering of tone."

"... when you present a pathetic situation, you have to let it speak entirely for itself. I mean you have to present it and leave it alone. You have to let the things in the story do the talking. I mean that, as an author, you can't force it ... The first thing is to see the people at every minute. You get into the old man's mind before you let us know exactly what he looks like. You have to learn to paint with words."