All Quotes

It's a nervous work. The state that you need to be in to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.

—Shirley Hazzard

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in again.

—Oscar Wilde

Contrary to what many of you might imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks—chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.

—Fran Lebowitz

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.

—S. E. Hinton

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.

—Joan Didion

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.

—Florence Nightingale

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

—Immanuel Kant

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

—Samuel Johnson

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

—Audre Lorde

Let us not paralyze our capacity for good by brooding overman's capacity for evil.

—David Sarnoff

Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for.

—Jerry Rubin

He who cannot dance claims the floor is uneven.

—Hindu saying

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

—Brendan Gill

If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?

—Lois McMaster Bujold