Gençken tecrüben yoktur, yaşlıyken de gücün.

Yirmi beş yaşındayken insanlar üzerine ne bilebiliriz ki?

Sir, I shall not defeat you – I shall transcend you.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it...

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.

There can be no forced inspiration.

When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.

We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.

Although personal calling I sense,Who am I? even if I am, I don’t know.

Oblivion cures the old wounds.

For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.

Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.

How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.

People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth...

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don’t care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that...

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a...

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

Are you sure?” Aidan asked, “Gavriel’s still a vampire.” “He warned me about you and about them. He didn’t have to. I’m not going to repay that by-” she hesitated, then frowned. “What did you...

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of...

We’re not so different, you and I. Sure, we may have different religious beliefs, political outlooks, sexual orientations, economic viewpoints, and artistic/literary/culinary tastes, but deep down we both want the same thing: To be loved...

Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers ― from the first to the last, including the most fleeting ― part of that unique love, and is each of them...

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which...

It’s a truth universally acknowledged…

You see the world in colors,I see in Black and Red.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.

Literary art’s sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that...

God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn’t know, that wasn’t taught...

A story has to break your heart or it’s not worth telling.

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night...

Sneakiness was a form of privacy and privacy here was the first loss.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is...

With her it’s as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don’t think it has...

This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it...

Salah satu bentuk kemalasan seorang perempuan adalah untuk mencari jati diri yang selanjutnya paska berumahtangga. Rasa kenyamanan memang bisa menghancurkan.

We can sum up the surrealist distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘poetry’ by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the...

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

You can’t eat [literature], that’s the problem,” he said. “I’ve tried, it’s very dry, and not at all nutritious.

Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them–I look upon good novels–as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and...

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know...

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot....