William Akin > William Akin's Quotes

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
― Howard Zinn

“I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“We are the poem's ancient band of twelve that proceeds through the ages. There were twelve of us, when we ruled the world on the cloud-covered top of Olympus, and twelve when we lived as birds in Ygdrasil's green crown. Wherever poetry went forth, there we followed. Did we not sit, twelve men strong, at King Arthur's round table, and did twelve paladins not go in Charles the Twelfth's great army? On of us has been Thor, another Jupiter, as any man should be able to see in us yet today. The divine splendor can be sensed under the rags, the lion's mane under the donkey hide. Time has treated us badly, but when we are there, the smithy becomes Mount Olympus and the cavalier's wing a Valhalla.”
― Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berling's Saga

“A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .”
― Robert Bringhurst

“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.”
― Kenneth Rexroth

“I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.”
― Kenneth Rexroth

“I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
--Gravity's Rainbow, V699”
― Thomas Pynchon

“If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“What are they doing?” he whispered.
The pinball machine’s scoreboard was full, the bank’s windows fogged. They were so involved- so cofaithed- that they didn’t know we were there.
The VW’s face joined, “Are they hurting each other?”
I took a breath. “There’s risk involved, because of what they can’t see. Plus the risk of trust. But no-they’re not hurting each other.”
The bank whispered something in the pinball machine’s ear and the pinball machine giggled.
“What are they saying to each other?” the VW said.
“They’re expressing their faith, VW-sharing it.”
Just then I heard a rustle, soft at first, then louder…Distracted by other things-the VW, the faith in the trees- I had forgotten to keep the mountain straight in my mind. I had let it go, and now it was changing, reversing itself, growing young: the leaves were turning from brown back to green… THIS was western Massachusetts-unpredictable; a changing moving bitch; a switcher of faces…how could I have many any progress here when mountains were mountains one moment and something else the next; when people were here one day and then GONE?”
― Christopher Boucher, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Novel

“She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas