It is a grave matter to enter a war, without adequate military preparation it may prove fatal to come into peace, without moral and religious preparation.

I like to deal in the reality of life. I'm too old to sing about women and things like that.

Geezer Butler

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

Susan Orlean

Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

Thomas Gray

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

Don DeLillo

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.

Charles Dickens

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?

Oliver Sacks

People say I'm not good at writing about men. My dad left when I was 16. Give me a break. I'm doing the best I can.

Jennifer Weiner

I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens.

Alma Guillermoprieto

There is no pleasure in having nothing to do. The fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.

Mary Little

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.

Thom Yorke

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti