What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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?