It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.
Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.
From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
When a man hangs from a tree it doesn’t spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.
Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.
Commuter – one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides back to shave again.
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist – nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.
The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay.
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable – or at least deserving of support.
It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home – a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn’t forget that sort of association.
A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.