The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

C.S. Lewis

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

Roland Joffe

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Haruki Murakami

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

Henry James

This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;They are the books, the arts, the academes,That show, contain and nourish all the world.

William Shakespeare

Rooting is following, and I don't do that, but I'd like to see the Phillies win because I love Philadelphia.

Steve Carlton

At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.

Shirley Chisholm

How can you be in hell while you are in my heart?

Orlando Bloom

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.

Robert Neville

The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.

Martin Luther King Jr.