Quote your favourite author!!

[bazarov]

To get things clear; firstly they have to be very unclear. But if you get them too early, you probably got them wrong - Dostoevsky

It's not that often that somebody quotes himself, but this will be an exception. I've read thread theme, and not whole first post, so I've missed writing part...
As a true realist, I find truth more important than success, but the problem is today many find success more important than truth!

[Set of Keys]

"'Why do you want to write poetry?' If the young man answers, 'I have important things I want to say,' then he is not a poet. If he answers, 'I like hanging around words listening to what they say,' then maybe he is going to be a poet." W. H. Auden

Pretty much most of 'Strong Opinions' by Nabokov.

[Set of Keys]

Also-

"It takes one to know one"

Leo Tolstoy.

[Bebbin]

This is one of my tops from William Faulkner:

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

[nps_marina]

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

- Byron

[kiz_paws]

..."Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another..."

--Siddhartha

[Uncle Lar]

"To thine own self be true."
(William Shakespeare, HAMLET)

[Amanda29]

This is just one of the best quotes from my favorite novel - Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." [partial quote]

Of course a person really needs to read the novel to understand what the quote, uttered by a disdainful character named Mr. Darcy, fully means. In short, it was a very rude and hateful thing to say about any lady in those days of gentility. Yet, it's smart and sophisticated, and I apreciate it more in light of the novel's ending - in which Mr. Darcy has to eat his words and swallow his pride.

[quasimodo1]

E.M. Cioran on friendship: " Friendship is a pact, a convention. Two beings tacitly promise never to broadcast what each really thinks of the other. A kind of alliance based on compromises. When one of them publicly calls attention to the other's defects, the pact is declared null and void, the alliance broken. No friendship lasts if one of the partners ceases to play the game. In other words, no friendship tolerates an exaggerated proportion of honesty". Not much of an optimist, but worth reading. quasimodo1

[Kara Ortiez]

"I desire a society which selects its rulers, from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself - whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any one class is fatal to the
welfare of the whole." Scaramouche Rafael Sabatini

[Enchanted]

"Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence"

-Salman Rushdie in "Midnight's Children"

[F.Emerald]

Pretty much most of 'Strong Opinions' by Nabokov.

Precisely

[whitetree]

the last place which i want to go is where i come from,but i forget where it is
Tagore

[Telegram Sam]

He's not quite my favorite, but there's a Vonnegut quote about writing which I've always found funny, insightful, and encouraging all at once:

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

[Demian]

"Immature poets borrow. Mature poets steal." -T.S Elliott

"Life does not consist mainly-or even largely of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head." -Mark Twain

"The problem with being educated is that it takes a lifetime to accomplish and all that you learn in the end is that it would have better benefited you to have gone into banking." -Phillip K. Dick