One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one’s psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it – so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
It is useless either to hate or to love truth – but it should be noticed.
Time heals all things but one: Time.
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
He who cries, ‘What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,’ does not know even that.
Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.
All politicians know that every ‘temporary’ political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.
I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.
Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers – and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.
It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn’t matter.
One reason writers write is out of revenge.