People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven’t got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose – why haven’t I got it?
The true manipulator never has a reputation for manipulating.
Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn’t you say?
Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.
Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.
Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
I’m not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I’m 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle – that’s what fiction is, and should be.
Don’t dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you’re trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic – you want all those inequalities, because that’s what makes life interesting.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.