Headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.
The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
Knowledge is nothing without action. Nothing changes until you do something. What you do will directly determine what you learn.
Irony. . . may be defined as what people miss.
I was amazed to go Oscar and win it. It was fantastic getting up on the stage there and looking down. I thought, "That guy looks like Steve Martin, and that guy's like Arnold Schwarzenegger. " But it was Steve Martin, and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they have this terrible kind of conveyor belt backstage - literally - where they take you to this big hangar where the world's press are gathered, and they make you stand on a stage, and they introduce you.
The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.