Biography lends to death a new terror.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

The racing is quite boring, sometimes. It’s hard to see how it pulls in fans.

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

Every loss of life is terrible.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as ‚failed states.‘

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

In every parting there is an image of death.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.