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.
Don’t judge it. Just write it. Don’t judge it. It’s not for you to judge it.
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive.
I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.
You can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.
Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one’s orbit.
It’s the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
There’s something every woman wants, and that’s a man to blame.
Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.
When he is sick, every man wants his mother.
There were many hours when I never quite know how I’d gotten there or why I stayed.
How can one say, ‘No, this isn’t a part of life,’ since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.
One either imposes one’s ideas or one is imposed on.
At a certain stage of misery, you’ll try anything to explain what’s going on with you, even if you know it doesn’t explain a thing and it’s one failed explanation after another.