Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature.
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really.
There are no uncontaminated angels.
Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.
The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
People are unjust to anger – it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.
How easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard.
The pleasure isn’t in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.
Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them – at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.