This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing.
Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
Books are the door of escape from the forest.
There is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.
I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.
Oh, I never look under the hood.
Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s and our Camelot.
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles.
I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.
When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.