"I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness."

"It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart."

"Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love."

"He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

"Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice."

"People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature."

"There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction."

"Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet."

"But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it."

"We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next."

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away."

"A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study."

"At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth."

"In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California."

"Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately."

"With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything..."

"A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out."

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is."

"Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it - eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, 'comical.' It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure."

"The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop."

"Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves."

"He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate, in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life."

"Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay."

"Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it."

"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom."

"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

"I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the 'warehouse of good intentions': 'Can't do it now.' 'Then put it on hold.' This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death-because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses."

"In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries."

"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

"All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

"I am not an ornithologist-I am a bird."

"No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending."

"A man may say, 'From now on I'm going to speak the truth.' But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking."

"The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience."

"Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature."

"Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena."

"I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want."

"A man is only as good as what he loves."

"You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time."

"She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand."

"Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same."

"A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him."

"What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?"

"And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good."

"Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average."

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"Oh, God, Wilhelm prayed, 'Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy."

"The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business."