After love a formal feeling comes.
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There’s something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn’t even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hard-working.
I learned you don’t discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted – and didn’t want – it to be.
Evil isn’t a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That’s why we have art.
God’s blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one’s elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one’s generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the ‘self’ see the ‘self’ with any objectivity?
When I’m really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it’s as though I’m writing a letter to someone I’m desperately in love with.
My writing is full of lives I might have led.
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.
Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.
The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.