Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”
― Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“I always advise people never to give advice.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.”
― Quentin Crisp

“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.”
― Michael Moorcock, Elric: The Stealer of Souls

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement - no matter how temporary.”
― Craig Thompson, Blankets

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.”
― Woody Allen

“I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.”
― Woody Allen

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
― Terence McKenna

“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

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes

“Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

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

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”
― Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

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

“Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.”
― Christopher Priest

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye