Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. |
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain. |
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance. |
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other |
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. |
How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. |
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. |
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire. |
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. |
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. |
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. |
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. |
In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none. |
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. |
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. |