I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to.
There are still a few men who love desperately.
I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn’t blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.
The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.
Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
There’s a marvelous peace in not publishing, there’s a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.
I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone – a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
I’d never yell, “Good luck!” at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.
Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.
You don’t know how to talk to people you don’t like. Don’t love, really. You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won’t wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she’ll hear you.
She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.
That’s the whole trouble. When you’re feeling very depressed, you can’t even think.
How old are you? I asked her. “Old enough to know better.” she said.
That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.
His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them.
I suspect that money is a far greater distraction for the artist than hunger.
If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.
Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.