Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.
Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do. What you have done you’ll do lots more.
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.
A writer’s self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.
Don’t you see, if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.
Love makes the air light.
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
Women are an alien race set down among us.
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.