"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on."
— William S. Burroughs

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
— James Baldwin (Sonny's Blues)

"What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering."
— Bernard Malamud

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Gibson

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"Blond trollops who don go-go boots flop pompoms nonstop to do promos for floorshows. Wow! Hot blonds who doff cotton frocks show off soft bosoms. Hot to trot, two blonds who smooch now romp on cold wood floors for crowds of morons, most of whom hoot or howl: whoop, whoop"
— Christian Bök (Eunoia)

""You can't commit a crime while you are reading a book""
— John Waters

"A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
— Plato

"I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
— Gertrude Stein

"If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me."
— Gertrude Stein

"Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us."
— J.G. Ballard

"Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance."
— Thomas Pynchon (Slow Learner: Early Stories Tag: With an introduction by the author)

"Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see."
— Thomas Pynchon (V.)

"I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. "
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?"
— Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)

"You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be. "
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change. "
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. "
— Raymond Chandler

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself."
— Raymond Chandler (Long Goodbye)

"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency."
— Raymond Chandler

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."
— Raymond Chandler

"As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
"
— Raymond Chandler (The Simple Art of Murder)

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. "
— Charles Willeford

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed."
— Martin Amis

"The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life."
— Martin Amis

"America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short."
— Martin Amis (The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America)

"Are snoopers snooping on their own pain? Probably."
— Martin Amis

"It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay. "
— Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)

"She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is.'"
— Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)

"A pier is a disappointed bridge."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)