James > James's Quotes

“I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”
― Mark Twain

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.”
― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“All great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.”
― Tom McCarthy, Remainder