Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't... analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave... off tormenting your neighbours about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know that your toddler needed love and approval but he often seemed not to care whether he got it or not and never seemed to k...now how to earn it. Your pre-school child is positively asking you to tell him what does and does not earn approval, so he is ready to learn any social refinement of being human which you will teach him....He knows now that he wants your love and he has learned how to ask for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever you are? You're chicken. You've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and... say, "Okay, life's a fact. People do fall in love. People do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and ...lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a televion set.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off... slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think of the moment you count most foul in your life;... conjure it, supplicate, pray to it; your face is bleak, you retract, you dare not remember it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Don't touch me, please I say, don't touch me, please. I'll not be put to bed by you, my man."... "Just as you say. Have it your own way, then. 'My man is it?' You talk like a professor...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his... predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »