Now Quotes (page 411)
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Stephen King
Good so be would you if, duff plum of helping second A," said the Bursar. The table fell silent. "Did anyone understand that?" said Ridcully. The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity som time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was quite often coherent, although not by normal human standards.
Terry Prachett
Guys, gals, now hear this: No one wants to take away your hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can't kill a home invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range.
Stephen King
So long as one remains in the same condition, the inclinations which result from habit and are the least natural to us can be kept; but as soon as the situation changes, habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only habit. Now are there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? Where does this difference come from? If the name nature were limited to habits conformable to nature, we would spare ourselves this garble!
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn’t any—that is to say, the continuity of the nothing... Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgment, in immortality. The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging, the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins, the...
Jean Baudrillard
Reading is the first to go," my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.
Anne Tyler
that manic depression, far from being a liability was an advantage. It was a selected trait. If it wasn't selected for, then the "disorder" would have disappeared long ago, bred out of the population like anything else that didn't increase the odds of survival. The advantage was obvious. The advantage was the energy, the creativity, the feeling of genius, almost, that Leonard felt right now. There was no telling how many great historical figures had been manic-depressives, how many...
Jeffrey Eugenides