Richard > Richard's Quotes

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”
― Italo Calvino

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.”
― Jim Thompson

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough”
― Walt Whitman

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?”
― Charles M. Schulz