The writer’s life seethes within but not without.
We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.
You don’t say, ‘I’ve done it!’ You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.
A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
The essence of pop stardom is immaturity – a wretched little pseudo-musical gift, a development of the capacity to shock, a short-lived notoriety, extreme depression, a yielding to the suicidal impulse.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
All novels are experimental.
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.