Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind.
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.