Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don’t know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
Dad is always hiding in his book.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.
Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.