As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.
It’s great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it.
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.
Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
Writing doesn’t require drive. It’s like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.