Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning’s work.
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing...
When it comes to the important things one is always alone...
I simply adore being alone – I find it a consuming thirst – and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.
How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!
We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.
You can’t plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I’m inspired.
I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.
Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
I’ve been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It’s not that, it’s a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.
Family life! The United Nations is child’s play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.