Mark Helprin Quotes

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Immigrants, Speak

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Raises, Plans

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

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Discourage, Strategy

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Suggest, Henry

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Liberals, Community

• Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It’s just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Storyteller, Revelation

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Immigrants, Built

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pages, Nonetheless

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Entry, Contrary

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Inequality, Treating

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Diamond, Mozart

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thinks, Spent

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Henry, Climb

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stable, Civil

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Generations, Loved

• ‘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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Profit, Descendants

• ‘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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Programs, Movement

• Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Publishers, Percent

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Bottle, Hotel, Stay

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Start, Elation

Mark Helprin (50)

Birth:	28th June, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Journalist, Novelist

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Today's Anniversary - 21st December

Births

• 1892 - Walter Hagen
• 1918 - Kurt Waldheim
• 1922 - Paul Winchell
• 1949 - Thomas Sankara
• 1925 - Paul Kurtz

Deaths

• 1889 - Joseph Barber Lightfoot
• 1935 - Kurt Tucholsky
• 2001 - David Swift
• 1958 - Lion Feuchtwanger
• 1992 - Stella Adler