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"All good art is an indiscretion."
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"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

"Music heals all forms of misery."

"The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
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"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."


"I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."


"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."


"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."


"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."


"Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation."


"I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success."


"Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!"
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