Quotes on Serious

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.

The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can. You don't expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you'll have when you're 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems.

An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

Policy makers should be compelled to take action given the serious costs of long-term unemployment when overall unemployment is already high. A week of unemployment is worse when it is experienced as part of a longer spell.

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

To enjoy life, you don't need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren't as serious as you make them out to be.

Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I was not treated like a serious young actress, and that was very hard. It sent me into psychotherapy, which is one of the smartest things I ever did. It taught me that I had to find value in myself.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.

While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.

Most women file for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, a job loss, or a family break up. It is hard to protect against those.