The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
When I’m writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
Movies are too literal.
A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as ‘fact’ are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.
And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?
Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.
I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.
And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.
It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.
He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were.
For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.