C. L. R. James Quotes

There's a right thing to do," Holden said. "You don't have a right thing, friend," Miller said. "You've got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.

Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.

No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.

Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas.

Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

The best predictor of preschool children's physical activity is simply being outdoors.

In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.

Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what Im hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me.

Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.

On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.

Life is weather. Life is meals.

Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.

A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you're good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn't last long and you're quickly discarded.

But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.

God is the God of the people who are at their wits end, who are right up against it with their backs to the wall, and He delights to come to our help when we need Him most.

I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.

The normal economic system works itself.

I'd say the biggest relationship is the repetition of certain themes. I don't want to say "topics," but certain points of interest.

Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be.

A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing

One tends to write beyond what's needed

What are the questions you wish to ask?

Great ideas are fish in a stream. Your pen/pencil is a spear. If you don't spear them, they'll swim on by. Be ready.

[Rumors are a] vehicle for anxieties and aspirations that may not be openly expressed.

Secrets are inherently selfish. The longer you keep them, the harder it is to put yourself in other people's shoes about them and the more irrational your thinking surrounding it becomes.

I'm a really anxious person, so I tend not to keep secrets. I tend not to even want to hear them. It's too nerve-wracking for me to try and keep things from people.

Secrets can be poisonous.

It's always fun to try something new, and to play a new character, and it's fun to play another period.

As your life goes on you should gain a deeper understanding of the world and the people moving through it; but that might be asking too much.

Revenge is a really narrow scope through which to view things. In the same way secrets do, it has this ability to warp everything. But secrets are more inward, and revenge is outward.