Pastoral Resources

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring.

People enjoy sitting back knowing they won't hear a lot of four-letter words.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

So what this is is us, our personalities refined down on to a stage performance. In other words, the way we play is the end product of the way we live - we live in the cities, you see.

But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No."

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Every man of courage is a man of his word.

It's great when you play to an audience that knows the words to all your songs, and sings them back to you.

His words and music weren't just joined; they were inseparably married.

Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.

Words without deeds is an affront to the principle that guides our Nation and makes a mockery of the values we as public servants claim to love.