The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.
If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!
You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn’t too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.
I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.
I don’t see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it’s going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.
Tis e’er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o’erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.
The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let’s say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it’s at that point you need coaching.
The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency.
History – an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant.
Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
Though life’s tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.
Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.
It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.
Tis e’er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.
It’s easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.
He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.