"Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?"
— Cory Doctorow

"Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly."
— Stephen King

"Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?'"
— Connie Willis

"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"A book worth reading is worth owning."
— John Ruskin

"I'll do it because I want to but not because you tell me to!"
— Betty MacDonald

"I am a writer who came froma sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."
— Eudora Welty (On Writing)

"Osama, baah!" Bashir roared.

"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever."
— Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time)

"Any group that includes Charlemagne, Rock Hudson, Paul McCartney, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Jack the Ripper, and the Boston Strangler must be select, if not elite."
— James De Kay

"Life is a gift...
Life is a test...
Life is temporary assignment...."
— Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here for?)

"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. "The Magic Flute" v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. "The Last Supper" v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it."
— Nick Hornby

"'He's got a can up there,' Richard said."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)

""Eliminate all the fluff. Try to inject personality with attitude, not fluffy language. Take a position and support it with your data. Then puke.""
— Tim McElligott

"Knowledge is power, but how you use that power defines whether you're good, or evil."
— Daniel Jackson

"He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth."
— T.H. White

"I don't like using the word evil because it sounds as if that's all there is to be said about the person. I don't think Richard III is evil, I don't think it's helpful to say that...Iago he's not evil. Iago didn't get the job, he thinks his wife's been unfaithful to him, he doesn't like black people, he's extremely talented and very unfulfilled and he's a wonderful liar, and he's a mischeif maker and he does some dreadful, dreadful things. But that's already interesting, isn't it? Ooh, who is this guy? But if you just say "ah oh he's evil" how can you play that? I don't know how you play an evil person."
— Ian McKellan

"A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

Orham Pamuk, NYer - Dec. 25, 2006 & Jan. 01, 2008"
— Orham Pamuk

"You only have one life, use it wisely that means NO life risking actiities unless it is fun.

-Robert Stodola"
— Robert Stodola

"Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)

"The script sits in front of you. The writer’s translated into ink what is in his spirit and his soul and his mind. Bum. [Thumps table.] I come along, I pick it up, and the ink goes into my eyes, into my mind, into my body, flows around and that part starts to inhabit me. And I know a good part when I see one."
— Peter O'Toole

"Why, I was not aware we had quarreled."
— Henry David Thoreau