The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There’s a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can’t alter.
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it’s the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct.
I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time, as I’ve learned over and over again. You’ve got to wait before you write about them.
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.