Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Kurt Vonnegut

A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.

James Madison

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

Vaclav Havel

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

Thomas A. Edison

Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.

Neil Abramson

Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.

Oscar Wilde

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.

Ulysses Simpson Grant

Calamity with us, is made an excuse for doing wrong. With them, it is erected into a reason for their doing right. This is really the justice of rich to poor, and I protest against it because it is so.

Charles Dickens

Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems

Romana Machado

Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.

Barbara de Angelis

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Stephen King

Don't be crazy to do a lot of things you can't do .

Edward W. Howe