Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.
Either one fails in one’s art or in one’s life.
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for ‘artist’ or ‘art.’ Everyone is an artist.
I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.
To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.
My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.
In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.
The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.
When I don’t write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.
There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.
One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
Everything but happiness is neurosis.
In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.
This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.