“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
“History is written by the winners.”
“I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”
“One of the strangest things in the world is that you can read a page or many pages of a book while thinking about something completely unrelated.”
“Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.”
“Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people smart, mathematics makes people meticulous, natural philosophy makes people sophisticated, ethics makes people dignified, and logical embellishment makes people eloquent.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“Stories govern more than genetics.”
“The difference between a fairy tale and a war is that one starts 'Once upon a time.”
“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
“The oldest, shortest words - 'yes' and 'no' - are those which require the most thought.”
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
“Then something woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
“To compare quotation books is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.”
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like foie gras.”
“What is a mother? In The Brothers Karamazov, a promiscuous lady gets pregnant. After the baby is born, she puts it in a box and hides it behind a wall. When the police arrive, they find three more boxes. Would you still call her a mother?”
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
“In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves; self-discipline with all of them came first.”
“All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
“The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will forever be beautiful—is truth.”
“Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts.”
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”