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I have been fighting over commas all my life.
Mark Helprin
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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Fighting
Life
Commas
More quotes by Mark Helprin
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
Mark Helprin
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.
Mark Helprin
Words were all he knew they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.
Mark Helprin
There's an expression in Yiddish, which is der gelernte naar - a learned fool. You can know a great deal, you can have a Ph.D., and you can still be a total idiot.
Mark Helprin
Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
Mark Helprin
Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.
Mark Helprin
There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
Mark Helprin
If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
Mark Helprin
What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.
Mark Helprin
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
Mark Helprin
When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
Mark Helprin
My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.
Mark Helprin
Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.
Mark Helprin
World War II is the war that made our world. There's no question about that. The history of all the years in which I will spend my life, every single one, that is the seminal event of the history that we will experience.
Mark Helprin
That's what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don't conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don't fit, then they kill them. That's what happened in the Soviet Union and China.
Mark Helprin
I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.
Mark Helprin
She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.
Mark Helprin
When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.
Mark Helprin
The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.
Mark Helprin
It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
Mark Helprin