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Quotes by Writer
"To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity."
23
"I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood."
23
"I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes."
23
"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."
23
"We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained."
23
"Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."
23
"Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light."
23
"And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea."
23
"The superfluous is very necessary."
23
"A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it."
23
"The best of my essence is shown to those who value my energy and appreciate my love, some would call it selfish, I call it selective."
23
"And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall."
23
"The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me."
23
"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see."
23
"I mean that if you are not absolutely sure of a thing, it is so difficult to commit yourself to a definite course of action."
23
"Oh, I'm not afraid of death! What have I got to live for after all? I suppose you believe it's very wrong to kill a person who has injured you-even if they've taken away everything you had in the world?"
23
"In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible."
23
"Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive."
23
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
23
"I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me."
23
"Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course."
23
"Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears - everything, in delicate vibration."
23
"It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes."
23
"I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward."
23
"All the characters and plots were predetermined. Games make bad plots."
23
"Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience."
23
"The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain."
23
"You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute."
22
"Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in."
22
"In the plains the grass grows tall, since there is no one to cut it. There is no one to water it either."
22
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