155 quotes
I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments.
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
The Human Comedy (1943)
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)
Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)
I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money.
I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)
A man must pretend not to be a writer.
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
There is only good and bad art.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964)
Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
Jesus never said anything about absurdity... he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?
In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world.
Inhale and Exhale (1936)
The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)