Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It takes time and tiredness and tension to hate a city.”
― John Horne Burns, A Cry of Children

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/Where wealth accumulates and men decay”
― Oliver Goldsmith

“Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”
― Jim Thompson

“One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.”
― John Williams, Augustus

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.”
― James Agee

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.”
― James Thurber

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.”
― James Dickey

“I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.”
― James Dickey

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”
― William Styron

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.”
― Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird

“Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations.”
― Edgar Pangborn, Davy

“I dream in fire but work in clay.”
― Arthur Machen

“Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“We are our own dragons and our own heroes. We must rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
― Peter S. Beagle

“May the devil himself splatter you with dung.”
― Jean Cocteau, Cocteau: 3 Screenplays

“People love nobody as much as they do their hatred.”
― Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun

“I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
― Herman Melville