Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon.
There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.
People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they’re full of shame. You just don’t go in and inject democracy into them. They’re half crazy with their own...
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.
One thing I’ve learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don’t feel it; there’s probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind.
I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.