No one needs a vacation more than the person who just had one.

My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.

John Updike

I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm. At the time this was the last thing on my mind...

Terry Pratchett

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals

Mark Twain

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people.

Ann Brashares

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

Edie Sedgwick

I will grow. I will become something new and grand, but no grander than I now am. Just as the sky will be different in a few hours, its present perfection and completeness is not deficient, so am I presently perfect and not deficient because I will be different tomorrow. I will grow and I am not deficient.

Wayne Dyer

Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.

William L. Shirer

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

Kurt Vonnegut

I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.

Kevin Bacon

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

Virginia Woolf

As an unperfect actor upon the stageWho with much fear is put besides his partOr some fierce thing, replete with too much rageWhose strengths abundance weakens his own heartSo I, for fear of trust, forget to sayThe perfect ceremony of love's riteAnd in mine own love's strength seem to decayO'ercharged with burthen of my own love's mighto, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breastWho plead for love, and look for recompenseMore than that tongue that more hath express'd.O, learn to read what silent love hath writTo hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

William Shakespeare

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

Auguste Rodin