Latest Quotes

“Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do—j…”

— Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

“This is not a cookbook.”

— Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking

“Tommy Wiseau has always been an eccentric dresser, but on a late-summer night in 2002 he was turning the heads of every model, weirdo, transvestite, and face-life artist in and around Hollywood's Palm Restaurant.”

— Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.”

— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”

— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dover Thrift Editions)

“Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining mea…”

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away.”

— E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when s…”

— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps in our enormous family, my youngest sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour.”

— J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend—the weekend of the Yale game.”

— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.”

— William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Mother died today.”

— Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Howard Roark laughed.”

— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded 'Rock Around the Clock'—then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we…”

— Bob Dylan, Chronicles

“Not very long ago, an encyclopedia salesman stopped by America's oldest library building, which is the lovely Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village, on Cape Cod's north shore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works

“All this happened, more or less.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)