Then I started wondering like a bastard what the one sitting next to me, that taught English, thought about being a nun and all, when she read certain books for English. Books not necessarily with a lot of sexy stuff in them, but books with lovers and all in them.
Don’t you think there’s a time and place for everything? Don’t you think if someone starts out to tell you about his father’s farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle’s brace? Or, if his uncle’s brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn’t he have selected it in the first place as his subject – not the farm?
You’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there. But immediately. You can’t afford to lose a minute, Not you.
The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.
And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.
Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
I know that sounds mean to say, but I don’t mean it mean.
He took a deep drag on it, as if it were a kind of respirator in an otherwise oxygenless world.
Horrible, but right. An honest Medusa’s Head.
Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. “Are you a poet?” he asked. “A poet?” Nicholson said. “Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?” “I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
He stood up and walked over to the window. He looked down at the street, scratching his spine with his thumb. “Look at ’em,” he said. “Goddam fools.” “Who?” said Ginnie. “I don’t know. Anybody.
Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.
You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with.
Nobody’s be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.
The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her. That’s.
My credo is stated. I sit back. I sigh – happily, I’m afraid. I light a Murad, and go on, I hope to God, to other things.
What a school. You were always watching somebody cut their damn toenails or squeeze their pimples or something.
So what I did was, I went over and bought two orchestra seats for I Know My Love. It was a benefit performance or something. I didn’t much want to see it, but I knew old Sally, the queen of phonies, would start drooling all over the place when I told her I had tickets for that, because the Lunts were in it and all. She liked shows that are supposed to be very sophisticated and dry and all, with the Lunts and all.
What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.
He said he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle.