Thomas Berger > Quotes

“If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you'll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”
― Thomas Berger

“The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he'll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“I expect Custer was crazy enough to believe he would win, being the type of man who carries the whole world within his own head and thus when his passion is aroused and floods his mind, reality is utterly drowned.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“The buffalo eats grass, I eat him, and when I die, the earth eats me and sprouts more grass. Therefore nothing is ever lost, and each thing is everything forever, though all things move.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“Time is the bastard offspring of an incestuous act that God committed upon reality." Merlin to Arthur in "Arthur Rex”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex

“I have a belief that a man's real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.”
― Thomas Berger

“Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: 'Git on out of here, you old skunk!' Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don't know fear.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”
― Thomas Berger

“I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“When you run into a story of more than three against one and one winning, then you have heard a lie.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”
― Thomas Berger

“Tell us, Merlin,” said he, “why do we feel no sense of triumph in this?” And Merlin answered, “Well, is not triumph a childish feeling, Sire?”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex

“time belongs to everybody and everything, and nobody and nothing can lay claim to any part of it exclusively, so if you talk about the past as though there was just one version of it that everybody agrees on, you might be seen as stealing the spirit of others,”
― Thomas Berger, The Return of Little Big Man

“All human beings must perform according to their nature.”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel

“…What it means is you will fight until you’re all used up. Far from being sour, life is so sweet you will live it to the hilt and be consumed by it.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“Then I am fundamentally a slave, I whom you call the most glorious king of all?” said Arthur. “No man is free who needeth air to breathe,” said Merlin.”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex

“For he was big, and I don’t care what you say, for every inch a man grows over five foot five, his brain diminishes proportionately. All my life I have had a prejudice against overgrown louts.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“but we must show them that shedding blood should have nothing to do with being a man.” This of course was said by someone who was not of the male sex. If she had created men they would have been nicer than the ones turned out by God.”
― Thomas Berger, The Return of Little Big Man

“like all wicked people he could do things which defied the means of honest men, for evil is always more easily managed than virtue.)”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel

“It is finally only the fiend who doth truly worship God, as the felon adores the hangman, for the one is defined by the other.”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex

“But, Sire, the curse which shall ruin you eventually is the selfsame which ruins all men, irrespective of their actions good or evil, and that is Time, which is the issue of an incestuous act performed by God on reality.”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex

“privilege is founded on duty, and if the horse carries the man, the animal is fed before the rider himself doth eat. Thus in certain respects the first comes last, and the greatest king is the loneliest.”
― Thomas Berger, Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel

“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there. ”
― Thomas Berger

“Hickok and the others now returned from looking at the saloon sign, and this suck-up who had been talking to me, he asked what happened and another man says: “He put all ten inside the hole of the O, by God!” And everybody was whistling and gasping at the wonder of it—well, not exactly everybody, for there was other scouts and gun-handlers around, people like Jack Gallagher, Billy Dixon, Old Man Keeler, and more who was well known in them days, and they looked thoughtful so as not to display jealousy. As elsewhere in life, there are specialists on one hand, and the audience on the other.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man: A Novel

“That silly pimp!”
― Thomas Berger, Crazy in Berlin: A Novel