H.W. Charles Quotes

It began as a mistake.

People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

it seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.

I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn't have much to argue about.

I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't.

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.

If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter.

Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.

That's the way it ends. The thin edge of the wedge.

it is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner.

A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated." - from 'Cows in Art Class

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

What were you going to do tonight?" "I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff." "Who's that?" "A dead Russian.

Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.

Art is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.

I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories.

Heraldry is the fusion of fact and fancy, myth and manner, romance and reality. It is an exuberant union of family, art, and history.

I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself…In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.

I was very briefly under contract to Disney Animation, to develop ideas for animated features. They don't like you to use the word "cartoon" around there.

All movement, of every creature, comes from the desire after something better.

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.

A coxcomb begins by determining that his own profession is the first; and he finishes by deciding that he is the first of profession.

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.

Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules; while common sense is contented to be right without them.

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.

Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.

Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.

Emulation looks out for merits, that she may exalt herself by a victory; envy spies out blemishes that she may lower another by defeat.

So long as lust, whether of the world or flesh, smells sweet in our nostrils, so long we are loathsome to God.

Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels.

The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

And reputation bleeds in ev'ry word.

Those who would make us feel must feel themselves.

When fiction rises pleasing to the eye, men will believe, because they love the lie; but truth herself, if clouded with a frown, must have some solemn proof to pass her down.

This a sacred rule we find Among the nicest of mankind, (Which never might exception brook From Hobbes even down to Bolingbroke,) To doubt of facts, however true, Unless they know the causes too.

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

Nor waste their sweetness in the desert air.

The love of God is no mere sentimental feeling; it is redemptive power!

The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.

That's the tragedy of the rich: They don't need anything.

The dirtiest mind in the world is the mind of a censor.

Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word - and the quiet obedience of His servants.