All systems are evil. All governments are evil. Not just a trifle evil. Monstrously evil.
When all the illusions of personal immortality are stripped away, there is only the act to maintain the freedom to act.
It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp.
It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive – literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell – it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, willing to give up almost anything for his art, and makes him, if he fails, such a miserable human being.
Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin. Not in a language that anyone any longer understands. Rushing, degenerate mutter of noises I send out before me wherever I creep, like a dragon burning his way through vines and fog.
Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry.
It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it’s been worse.
I was younger then. Still playing cat and mouse with the universe.
The future is as dark, as unreal, as the past.
Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and the grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, nothing is lost.
I wonder which one of us God finds more uninteresting.
Another irritant is accidental rhyme, as in the sentence “When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high – me too.” Notice here that the rhyme is offensive because both rhyme words, “blew” and “too” are stressed positions; that is, the voice comes down hard on them. The rhyme is not offensive, to most ears, if the writer can get one of the rhymes out of stressed position: “The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying, me too.
It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe – their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.
Only very odd people don’t realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.
Were they my brothers, my uncles, those creatures shuffling brimstone-eyed from room to room, or sitting separate, isolated, muttering forever like underground rivers, each in his private, inviolable gloom?
The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he’s lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he’s invaded is unlikely to accept him fully.
Why can’t I have someone to talk to?” I said. The stars said nothing.
What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
I am mad with joy. – At least I think it’s joy. Strangers have come, and it’s a whole new game. I kiss the ice on the frozen creeks, I press my ear to it, honoring the water that rattles below, for by water they came: the icebergs parted as if gently pushed back by enormous hands, and the ship sailed through, sea-eager, foamy-necked, white sails, riding the swan-road, flying like a bird! O happy Grendel! Fifteen glorious heroes, proud in their battle dress, fat as cows!
Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or “way,” an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious – a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand – and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.