I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.
It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
God, living is enormous!
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past; because we have survived.
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.
In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.