"
"Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong."


"
— Prince

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
— James Joyce

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
— James Joyce

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

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

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
-- Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead."
— Dorothy Parker

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

"There is no perfection only life"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

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

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
— William Butler Yeats

"I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams."
— William Butler Yeats

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
— Christopher Hitchens

"The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement."
— Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)

"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

"Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like."
— Noam Chomsky

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
— Noam Chomsky

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
— Noam Chomsky

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!"
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you. "
— Philip Roth

"Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else."
— Tennessee Williams

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
— William Faulkner

"Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing."
— William Faulkner

"I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
— William Faulkner

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
— William Faulkner

"My mother is a fish."
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"Pouring out liquor is like burning books."
— William Faulkner

"I feel like a wet seed, wild in the hot, blind earth.

~Dewey Dell"
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation."
— Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book)

"No two persons ever read the same book."
— Edmund Wilson

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Truman Capote

"The world is my country,
all mankind are my brethren,
and to do good is my religion."
— Thomas Paine

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
— Thomas Paine (Common Sense)

"The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind."
— Thomas Paine

"I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps."
— John Dos Passos

"People who don't read are brutes."
— Eugène Ionesco