You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
It was a pleasure to burn.
All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.
We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.
If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her.
If you're embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn't include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.
The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.
