Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.”
― Charlie Parker

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

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

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ”
― Susan Sontag

“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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

“Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.”
― Frank Zappa

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.

[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered.”
― Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
― Edward Albee

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“...only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while...”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.”
― Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise

“...a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“One way to avoid what has already been done is to be true to yourself.”
― Ramsey Campbell