To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence. |
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given |
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. |
We are most alive when we're in love. |
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. |
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell. |
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. |
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. |
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? |
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. |
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. |
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. |
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. |
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying |
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. |