William Hamilton Maxwell famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

  • It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

  • To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect,

  • I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

  • Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.

  • If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.

  • Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.

  • What's so great about television. You're able to tell a long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

  • Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

  • I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.

  • Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.