Mark Helprin quotes:

Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.

I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.

You will most appreciate 'Freddy and Fredericka' if you are familiar with the story of the Fall, the Good Hermit, 'Tom Jones,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Paradise Lost,' 'Henry V,' and 'My Cousin Vinny.' That doesn't mean that you can't enjoy or understand it on an emotional level, free of all allusion, which is the test of any book of fiction.

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

When people ask me why is 'Winter's Tale' a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.

The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president.

When I was very young, I used to clean up after my parents. If I stay in a hotel, I make the bed and clean the room when I get up, even the bathroom mirror, for which I carry a tiny bottle of ammonia.

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.

Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.

The thing that strikes you most about being a soldier in a war zone and in action to the small extent that I was, when actually people start shooting, which happened to me a couple of times, everything goes on automatic and there's a feeling of tremendous elevation and even elation.

One of the things I worked very hard on all my life was to be like everyone else. I tried very hard to fit in.

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.

If one accepts Hezbollah's self-description as a resistance movement, in which case one must, in light of the fact that Hezbollah never ceases to provoke, view Israel's mere existence as a continuing act of aggression, then Hezbollah has indeed shown that it can initiate conflict, resist, and survive.

Not a single illegal immigrant should or need enter the United States, not one. Contrary to the common wisdom, the borders are easy to seal, and controlling entry is hardly totalitarian.

I've never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can't even remain in the same room with coffee.

I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young.

At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.

The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.

Heavy blizzards start as a gentle and persistent snow.

I used to write exclusively with one particular Montblanc fountain pen, although lately I have had to use a roller-tip fountain pen, because I find it harder and harder to control the fine muscles of my right hand during prolonged periods of work. I buy boxes of Deluxe Uni-ball pens, use them until they start to drag, and then change.

In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else's version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it.

If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

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.

Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.

In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.

The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.

I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better.

As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.

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.

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.

Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.

And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it...

And there was no reason for them to be dancing the Peter Lake could see, except that it was an exceptionally beautiful night

But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-and-puffball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.

I know this may sound like an excuse, he saidBut tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions.Why don't you just shut up, said Hardesty.

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

They were dancing around the fountain, arm in arm, in an old Dutch dance, their cheeks touching, their hands entwined. They had no music; they hummed. And there was no reason for them to be dancing that Peter Lake could see, except that it was an exceptionally beautiful night.

I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

A good river is nature's life work in song.

He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but especially dancers, for dancing like nothing else says: I am still alive.

The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.

They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.

As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

I have jumped out of airplanes but I was not technically a paratrooper. I was an infantryman and a night fighter, anti-terrorist.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.

Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.

...I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.

...this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God's own signature on earth.

...to be paid for one's joy is to steal.

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.

And how does God speak to you?" "In the language of everything that is beautiful.

And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.

Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.

For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.

'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.

He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn't get him anything other than a living

If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.

I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.

It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.

It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.

Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.

Not surprisingly, he began to sing, and because no one in the world could hear him, and he sang without inhibition, he sang well.

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning." Memoir From Antproof Case

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.

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

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.

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

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.

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.

The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.

There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.

They're not just dreams. Not anymore, I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can't you see? I've been there.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

Truth is no rounder than a horse's eye.

We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings.

Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

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.

Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand - until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.