Words matter. These are the best Mark Helprin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation – if you’re in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can’t even remain in the same room with coffee.
Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the ‘Soave sia il vento’ and ‘Kentucky Woman.’ We have different words for ‘art’ and ‘idea’ because they are two different things.
‘Freeing’ a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, ‘The Garden Party,’ while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
Unlike Hezbollah, Israel’s more modest aim is to survive, and that it has done.
Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.
When I was very young, I used to clean up after my parents. If I stay in a hotel, I make the bed and clean the room when I get up, even the bathroom mirror, for which I carry a tiny bottle of ammonia.
I have jumped out of airplanes but I was not technically a paratrooper. I was an infantryman and a night fighter, anti-terrorist.
I don’t aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.
The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.
When people ask me why is ‘Winter’s Tale’ a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.
Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.
In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else’s version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s future.
Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
I’m sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can’t be literary.
Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.
The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.
Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.
No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
The thing that strikes you most about being a soldier in a war zone and in action to the small extent that I was, when actually people start shooting, which happened to me a couple of times, everything goes on automatic and there’s a feeling of tremendous elevation and even elation.
The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.
I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.
‘Creative Commons’ is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs – ‘free ware’ – and distribute them without charge.
If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.
