The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one’s situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?
People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.
The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Write about what you’re afraid of.
Well chaps first I’d like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.
Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that – one need merely look out of the window, for example.
Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
The important thing is the educational experience itself – how to survive it.
I don’t think you can talk about progress in art – movement, but not progress.
Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day...
Is death that which gives meaning to life?
The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.