You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler

We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.

Paulo Coelho

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Alan Watts

I am a Democrat. I have been one all of my life.

Jane Byrne

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

Albert Einstein

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there -- or failing to get there.

Max Lerner

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Christopher Hitchens

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and the one nearest at hand.

Michel de Montaigne

You have to risk failure to succeed. The important thing is not to make one single mistake that will jeopardize the future.

An Wang