Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to conquer the universe.
I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.
What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.
Never index your own book.
Take care of the people, and God Almighty will take care of Himself.
It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.
As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say? ‘You don’t. You can’t,’ she said.
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.
I’d rather have written “Cheers” than anything I’ve written.
The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.
I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.
Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We’ve destroyed our planet.
The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren’t and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.
The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.
The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.