It makes more sense to write one big book – a novel or nonfiction narrative – than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
If you’re going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface and exit through it.
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
I couldn’t unpeach the peaches.
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
It’s a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn’t recall having seen anything eat a flower – are they nature’s privileged pets?
Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
The way you live your days is the way you live your life.