Quote

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

Edward Abbey

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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Would
Reading
Cookies
Men
Business
Lifetime
Life
Else
Entire
Like
Become
Spend
Anything
Balance
Wearisome
Book
Healthy
Specialty
Great
Books
Packing
Make
Literature
Wholesome

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
Edward Abbey
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I would prefer to write about everything what else is there? But one must be selective.
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Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Edward Abbey
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Music is a savage art, a measured madness.
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
Edward Abbey
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A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
Edward Abbey
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It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
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Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
Edward Abbey
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Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Edward Abbey
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Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
Edward Abbey
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Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.
Edward Abbey
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How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
Edward Abbey
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One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
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Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
Edward Abbey
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New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
Edward Abbey
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Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
Edward Abbey
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Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead symmetrical but stiff.
Edward Abbey
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In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
Edward Abbey
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Wilderness begins in the human mind.
Edward Abbey
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We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.
Edward Abbey