All Quotes

"We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again. But let me say to the young people of Africa and the young people around the world — you, too, can make his life’s work your own. Over 30 years ago, while still a student, I learned of Nelson Mandela and the struggles taking place in this beautiful land, and it stirred something in me. It woke me up to my responsibilities to others and to myself, and it set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today. And while I will always fall short of Madiba’s example, he makes me want to be a better man. He speaks to what’s best inside us. After this great liberator is laid to rest, and when we have returned to our cities and villages and rejoined our daily routines, let us search for his strength. Let us search for his largeness of spirit somewhere inside of ourselves. And when the night grows dark, when injustice weighs heavy on our hearts, when our best-laid plans seem beyond our reach, let us think of Madiba and the words that brought him comfort within the four walls of his cell: “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” What a magnificent soul it was. We will miss him deeply."

"For a long time I've been walking down life's road with my two pals, Bad Luck and Bad Choices. Fortunately I'm a big believer in new beginnings, new friends, and running from my problems. So one day I decided to head for the island. Aloha, my name is Jack."

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

"I leave out the parts that people skip."

"What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice."

"My grandson, Max, who is an all state lacrosse player, once gave me some lacrosse advice: A limp pass is like a limp dick; it doesn't get the job done. I think the same can be said about limp writing."

"After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure."

"Well, the man don't just have to die, Foley. I mean, he could accidentally hurt himself falling down on something real hard, you know? Like a shiv, or my dick?"

"It's like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there's this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person's gone, and it's too late to do anything about it."

"I know a guy who walks into a bank with a little glass bottle. He tells everyone it's nitroglycerin. He scores some money off the teller, walks out. On his way out, the bottle breaks, he slips on it and knocks himself out. The "nitro" was Canola oil. I know more fucked-up bank robbers than ones who know what they're doing. I doubt if one in twenty could tell you where the dye pack is. Most bank robbers are fucking morons."

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."

"I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."

"I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone."

"The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices."

"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money."

"I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled — Hegel and his avatars — were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there."

"One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."

"At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags, Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

"I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples."

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."

"My lord, you know what Virgil sings— Woman is various and most mutable."

"Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire."

"Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word."

"Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."

"Sound for ever of Imperial Rome."

"I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man."

"He who in the days of yore Sang of pastures, sang of farms, Sang of heroes and their arms, Sang of passion, sang of war."

"Then the soul of Virgil seems To awaken from its dreams, To sing again the melodies Of which he often tells,— The music of the birds, The lowing of the herds, The tinkling of the bells."

"The use which the grammarians made of Vergil is so extensive that, if all the MSS. of him had been lost, it would be possible from the notices given us by the ancients of the Vergilian poems, and the passages quoted from them by the grammarians alone, to reconstruct practically the whole of the Bucolics, the Georgics, and the Aeneid."

"[Virgil] borrows royally from nearly every older master of style. Yet the result, if a mosaic, at least remains clear, beautiful, even harmonious, in its general design and effect."

"But it is to beauty that, like Dante, one returns as the final fact and feature of his style. Under Virgil's verbal sorcery, Latin becomes a golden language of exquisite richness, veined with a delicate melancholy and wistful reverie upon the abundant travail of life. If his wealth of tremulous pities and mystic dreams do not make true poetry, then poetry was never written."

"Does [Aeneas] really resemble Odysseus at any point? No—there is no greater difference within the whole compass of ancient literature; and to understand that is to see how absurd are those critics who would dismiss Virgil contemptuously as a mere plagiarist and imitator of Homer. There is no more profound or astonishing originality in all the literature of antiquity than Virgil's; and that precisely because it operates within the limits imposed by the inherited and traditional forms, which it reverently observes."

"With Virgil European poetry grows up."

"[Aeneas] is the symbol of Rome; and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilisation, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp. The Roman Empire and the Latin language were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves, and the poet in whom that Empire and that language came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny. [...] No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil."

"I think that he had few illusions and that he saw clearly both sides of every question—the case for the loser as well as the case for the winner."

"Virgil, among classical Latin poets or prose writers, is uniquely near to Christianity."

"...in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher … Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient Rome. ...Virgil was, among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning."

"No, Virgil, no: Not even the first of the Romans can learn His Roman history in the future tense, Not even to serve your political turn; Hindsight as foresight makes no sense."

"Why Virgil's poems have for the last two thousand years exercised so great an influence on our Western culture is, paradoxically, because he was a renegade to the true Muse. His pliability; his subservience; his narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom which the true poets who preceded him had prized; his perfect lack of originality, courage, humour, or even animal spirits: these were the negative qualities which first commended him to government circles and have kept him in public favour ever since. [...] Few poets have brought such discredit as Virgil on their sacred calling."

"Virgil's narrative style...is subjective or more accurately, empathetic-sympathetic. Virgil not only reads the minds of his characters; he constantly communicates to us his own reactions to them and to their behaviour."

"Homer is a world; Virgil, a style."

"Like every human being, a poet has to deal with three questions: how, what for, and in the name of what to live. The Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid answer all three, and these answers apply equally to the Emperor and to his subjects, to antiquity as well as to our times. The modern reader may use Virgil in the same way that Dante used him in his passage through Hell and Purgatory: as a guide."

"For Virgil all war is mad and one cannot conduct oneself morally on the battlefield."

"Virgil's influence on English literature has been enormous. He was Edmund Spenser's constant inspiration for the fanciful beauty of The Faerie Queene. The Aeneid was the model for John Milton's Paradise Lost not only in epic structure and machinery but also in style and diction. In the English Augustan age, John Dryden and countless others held that Virgil's poetry had reached the ultimate perfection of form and ethical content. There was some reaction against him in the Romantic period, but the Victorians, such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, rediscovered in full measure that sensitivity and pathos that the Romantics had complained that Virgil lacked."