Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Anything that consoles is fake.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Man’s creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Every artist is an unhappy lover.
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known than works of genius when you’re unknown.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one’s got to stop muddling.
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.