Simon King > Simon's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”
― J. G. Ballard

“As soon as we abandon our reason and are content to rely on authority, there is no end to our troubles.”
― Bertrand Russel

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”
― Anthony Burgess

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau

“How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is to be sure”
― Charles Crumb

“A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition