'The horror! The horror! |
[Even geniuses get the blues.] The more I write the less substance I see in my work, ... It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself -- and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. |
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. |
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. |
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns. |
A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. |
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love. |
A word carries far - very far - deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space. |
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. |
Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished |
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. |
All a man can betray is his conscience |
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward upon the miseries and credulities of mankind |
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation |
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook. |