So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them.
Write a short story every week. All fifty-two of them can’t be horrible.
The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain.
Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in high attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and stirring up dreams about clocks in all the beds where children slept.
Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons – they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines.
All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.
One time, as a child in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon...
Lived in Chicago, survived in New York, brooded in Detroit, floundered in lots of places, arrived here late, after living in libraries around the country all those years because I liked being alone, liked matching up in books what I’d seen on the roads.
The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. In.
The fiction writer is, first and foremost, an emotionalist.
I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.
AT DAWN, a juggernaut of thunder wheeled over the stony heavens in a spark-throwing tumult. Rain fell softly on town cupolas, chuckled from rainspouts, and spoke in strange subterranean tongues beneath the windows where Jim and Will knew fitful dreams, slipping out of one, trying another for size, but finding all cut from the same dark, mouldered cloth.
Burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes.
All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins.
Here you lie in the tremendous web. Others are about you, but they are whole – whole hearts and bodies. But all of you that lives is back there walking the desolate seas in evening winds. This thing here, this cold clay thing, is already dead.
Deep forests, dark caves, dim churches, half-lit libraries were all the same, they turned you down, they dampened your ardor, they brought you to murmurs and soft cries for fear of raising up phantom twins of your voice which might haunt corridors long after your passage.
I been figuring, what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, ‘Yes, sir, that’s happiness.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me?