Francis Bacon Quotes

Without a function, we cease to be. So, I will write till I die.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

You will never see a U-Haul behind a hearse.

Every man is of importance to himself, and, therefore, in his own opinion, to others; and, supposing the world already acquainted with his pleasures and his pains, is perhaps the first to publish injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh, for no man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

I have a suit in my closet with the pocket cut out. It's a reminder to me that I won't be taking anything with me. The last suit I wear won't need any pockets.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

I'm sixty-eight years old. What I do now will be read by unborn generations for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. For me, it's not about my work - that is, it's not about Wayne Dyer's work, how much money I make, how well I do, or how well my products do.

A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.

What we employ in charitable uses during our lives is given away from ourselves; what we bequeath at our death is given from others only, as our nearest relations.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die. ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

Does fashion matter? Always - though not quite as much after death.

Fame is a food that dead men eat, I have no stomach for such meat.

My grandmother made dying her life's work.

I'm what happens after death, which is writing.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.... [W]hat can we bequeath, Save our deposed bodies to the ground?... [N]othing can we call our own, but death... [L]et us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings: - How some have been depos'd, some slain in war; Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd.

When we are dead; rugs are no richer than a quick-thorn bed.