Harvard Commencement Speech Quotes

#1. Does the written word tame passions? Or subdue the forces of nature? Or does it find a harmony with the inhumanity of the universe? Or incubate a violence, held back but always ready to spring, to claw?

Italo Calvino

#2. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

J.K. Rowling

#3. Just at the moment he's writing a book on famine - goodness! it's sad - and there's a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.

Nancy Mitford

#4. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

John Steinbeck

#5. The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.

Kenneth Clark

#6. I think I technically learned some things, hopefully. But I go to the movies for characters and story and a berserk vision.

John Waters

#7. When you're young, you don't feel iconoclastic - you're just kind of doing what seems natural, what moves you.

Garry Trudeau

#8. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

#9. Every five years, I decide to learn something new.

Jean Pigozzi