Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say – or more – a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I’m still trying to educate myself. I don’t think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can’t do.
The muttered hint, “Remember, you have a stroke here,” freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
I’m always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I’m stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.
I really don’t want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
A few places are especially conducive to inspiration – automobiles, church – public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church – little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday.
Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.