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"Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
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Personal Development
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
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"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
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Personal Development
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
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Personal Development
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
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Personal Development
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
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Personal Development
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
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Personal Development
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
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Personal Development
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
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Personal Development
"Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood."
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"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."
Being
"To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful."
Character
"The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine."
Experience
"Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man."
Behavior
"There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others."
Literature
"So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend."
Relationship
"There is but one art to omit."
Expression
"There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people."
Virtue
"Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age."
Life
"A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right."
Reflection
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