John Quotes
Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch.
Men are more important than tools. If you don't believe so, put a good tool into the hands of a poor workman.
In my mind I still qualify as punk, though I know four out of five punks would disagree.
Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away.
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.
Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter, "Beware. You will never get out of this world alive."
I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.
You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.
Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness.
Faith in a better than that which appears is no less required by art than by religion.
No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.
We have all kinds of government compensation systems that are much more efficient than the lawyers.
Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.
The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought.
There is no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.
The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ's achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.
At an expense trifling indeed, compared to what she frequently spends upon unprofitable contests, she might place the moral world on a new foundation, and to rise the pinnacle of moral glory.
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.
To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.