Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”
― Stephen King

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.”
― John Steinbeck

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day. ”
― Thornton Wilder

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”
― Thornton Wilder

“The best thing about animals is they don't talk much”
― Thornton Wilder

“The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things.”
― Alistair Begg