This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

My work and my family are very important to me.

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon – no alternative.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

A war is a horrible thing, but it’s also a unifier of countries.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we’d think it’s a pretty serious problem. In fact, we’d probably go to war.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

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.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

You can be obsessed with the bad things people say and the good things; either way, you’re obsessed with yourself, and I’m not – you can become unhinged so easily.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don’t think it’s intelligent, and it’s not sane. So why would you want to support it?

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

The Second Amendment is just as important as all the other Amendments.

War is the business of barbarians.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

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

In politics nothing is contemptible.

I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated.

The last person I have ever criticized is an official. They have a tough job to do. Things are happening so quick.

Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

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

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

My principles are more important than the money or my title.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.