I don’t wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.
Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist’s desire to prove that he’s good. The terrible temptation of idealism!
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind.
I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
It’s human to have a secret, but it’s just as human to reveal it sooner or later.
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged – where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.
When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface.
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.
Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?
I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid.
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...