Derrick > Derrick's Quotes

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
― Agnes De Mille

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
― Anais Nin

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
― Kurt Vonnegut jr.

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
― Saul Bellow

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
― Saul Bellow

“In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence”
― Bei Dao

“I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.”
― Saul Bellow

“Between notes, he had contemplated means of destroying Myrna Minkoff but had reached no satisfactory conclusion. His most promising scheme had involved getting a book on munitions from the library, constructing a bomb, and mailing it in plain paper to Myrna. Then he remembered that his library card had been revoked.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too”
― Saul Bellow

“You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
― Dr. Seuss

“It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness”
― Honore de Balzac

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage: Ou Meditations De Philosophie Eclectique, Sur Le Bonheur Et Le Malheur Conjugal

“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”
― Agnes De Mille

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Historically, the most dangerous men on earth were men of God…especially when their gods became threatened.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“Fame is longing. Not yours, but the audience’s. A star is nothing more, nothing less, than the public face of private desire.”
― Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe