History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that’s when empires start to decline.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
Women, fire in their crotch, won’t burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots – places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.