Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.
Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.
Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today -- gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.
I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but toreceive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.
What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it — that's in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.
After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.
Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.
My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires."
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Let us be servants in order to be leaders.
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.
In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.
Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.
Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.
My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.
Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.
Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.
You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.
We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.
Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.
I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.
Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
Writing sustains me. But wouldn’t it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don’t write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don’t write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity.
Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?
Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.
Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.
Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
