Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.
I want incremental improvements. There’s the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general – it’s dreadful.
So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren’t even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe – it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.
America still is the center of the world, and what happens in the American economy matters everywhere.
Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.
They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
There isn’t what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press – where they’re looking around for something to attack. You don’t feel that there’s a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.
Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.
He didn’t want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Richard’s bookshelves weren’t alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn’t find.
It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.
The future could go this way, that way. The future’s futures have never looked so rocky. Don’t put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It’s the real stuff, the only stuff, it’s all there is, the present, the panting present.
It’s hard to make progress with grief.
When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.
Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.