Archives - January 2010

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one
another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the
word.

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to
endure it.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every
truth easily becomes a lie.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can
only think what everyone else is thinking.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really
nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you
can smell it and that is all.

The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself
in them.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the
long run. The daily work --- that goes on, it adds up.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

There is no pleasure in
having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing
it.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of
translations.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous
man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political
power, because democracy shapes our lives.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different
order of reality from that which is given to him.

Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've
got a pretty neck.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting
board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in
the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we
live, what is happening.

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a
computer down. The right season for that play, the right historical
moment, the right tonality.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Kids' views are often just as valid as the teachers'. The best
teachers are the ones that know that.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of
government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can
see nothing but sea.

Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their
inherent truth seem unbelievable.

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.

If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of
the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be
transmitted instantaneously by electricity.

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to
call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have
the patience to make art.

I don't need all that much --- I just need to know who my
characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and
I'll write myself out of their jam.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast
quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as
the crowning reward of art.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take
upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish,
hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Human beings will line up for miles to buy a bucket of
catastrophes, but don't try selling sunshine and light --- you'll
go broke.