Everybody’s weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it’s a sexual thing and sometimes it’s a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody’s nuts.
Every year there’s a few more things I’m not sure of. I’ve decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.
Sometimes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it’s the other way around.
Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.
As my grandmother used to say, if you’ve got nothing good to say about someone, let’s hear it.
Life, I’d heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don’t do much of either.
Take care. It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized that ours is a world which demands caution.
Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.
The New Your energy goes beyond anything you’ll find anywhere else. It’s too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.
So many changes, eating away at the world like water dripping on a rock.
When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.
When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.
The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit Can call it back to cancel half a line Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don’t call it something else.
People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.
You know what I realized?” “What?” “Most of the people I know are dead. I guess that happens.
Imaginative persons could probably find interesting things to do with handcuffs and a nightstick.
It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn’t scratch it.
Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.
I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.