Paul Bowles Quotes

30 quotes in 573 categories

• It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in…
• Publishers are thieves, they are on the other side of the barricade.
• The act of living had been enjoyable; at some point when I was not paying attention, it had turned into a different sort of experience,…
• Each time I go to a place I have not seen before I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I…
• If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
• Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.
• Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.
• How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
• If you don't know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to attempt to find out.
• It's unnecessary and destructive to think of oneself at all. People ask me, 'What do you think of yourself as?' My answer is, 'Nothing.
• Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number…
• The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.
• There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside
• Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.
• [A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with…
• The soul is the weariest part of the body.
• Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily…
• Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.
• He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just…
• You will find yourself among people. There is no help for this nor should you want it otherwise. The passages where no one waits are…

Browse Paul Bowles Quotes by Category