In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.
Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.
Guys like you make life easy for some women.
How should I know why! I didn’t invent human beings, Iggy.
The hour that burst the spirit’s sleep...
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here-and-now. Seize the day.
Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?
Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can’t be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.
I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?
I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.