The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer’s ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book. A book is ‘good’ only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.
If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world–the brains of men.
We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.
Life’s a lot different from what people pretend. That’s why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I’m beginning to guess that everybody’s like that.
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:it requires so much attention.
A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.
Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.
They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.
A town that has no ceiling price A town of double-talk A town so big men name her twice Like so: ‘N’Yawk N’Yawk.’
We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
There are three ingredients in the good life learning earning and yearning.
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti – it requires so much attention.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning earning and yearning.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning earning and yearning.
The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure is too great for his income of ideas.
If we all discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.
If we all discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried unresisting with the current. They float through easy days. They live unquestioning in the moment.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
My theology briefly Is that the universe Was dictated But not signed.
There is only one success-to be able to spend your life in your own way.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
There is only one success-to be able to spend your life in your own way.
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious he learned the habit from Nature.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.
There is only one rule for being a good talker – learn to listen.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
The trouble with wedlock is that there’s not enough wed and too much lock.