e. e. cummings

A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man. 

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long. 

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. 

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still. 

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks. 

Be of love a little more careful than of anything. 

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink. 

I imagine that yes is the only living thing. 

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. 

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. 

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. 

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making. 

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. 

Edward Albee

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties. 

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. 

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor. 

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you. 

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do. 

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic. 

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand. 

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve. 

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not. 

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it. 

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are. 

Epicurus

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs. 

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist. 

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for. 

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know. 

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding. 

I would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome. 

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another. 

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires. 

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble. 

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself. 

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life. 

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls. 

Justice... is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed. 

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life. 

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. 

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little. 

Thomas A. Edison

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.  

Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward! 

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing. 

Discontent is the first necessity of progress. 

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. 

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. 

Great ideas originate in the muscles. 

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine. 

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. 

I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists - proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision. 

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun. 

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work. 

I start where the last man left off. 

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves. 

Leonardo da Vinci

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions. 

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason. 

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. 

Art is never finished, only abandoned. 

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. 

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself. 

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness. 

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. 

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. 

He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind. 

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. 

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes! 

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Oscar Peterson

I am the worlds laziest writer.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.  

I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos. 

I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one. 

I have no one style. 

I play as I feel. 

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you. 

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. 

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn't be able to do that.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. 

We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour. 

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz. 

 

Kazuo Ishiguro

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma. 

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. 

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan. 

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world. 

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends. 

I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not. 

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff. 

 I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family. 

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them. 

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. 

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. 

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki. 

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.
here was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. 

There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to. 

Jack Benney

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Gags die, humor doesn't.

Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.

Hors D'oeuvre: A ham sandwich cut into forty pieces.

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.

I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.

If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

It's not so much knowing when to speak, when to pause.

Modesty is my best quality.

My wife Mary and I have been married for forty-seven years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never.

Albert Schweitzer

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... the truly wise person is colorblind.

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few stones upon it.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

Do something for somebody everyday for which you do not get paid.

Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

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.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.