Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.
Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more.
And as he spoke, I was thinking, ’the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.
Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.
Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
Let’s hope the first comes first.
I did the best I could with what I had.
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow’s newspaper.
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!
I think you’re a wonder. You’re beautiful. You’re mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions...
I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you’re a kid and you think you’ve found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don’t normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.