But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.
Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you to know with which ear you’ll listen.
That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.
Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.
Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?
Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
A day without writing was a little death.
I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.
This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.
He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.
I’m inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist.
Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?
The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.
Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
He says I’m a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.
In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other.