I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it.
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.