Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour – but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands – and who knows what to do with it?
I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. – Blanche Dubois.
The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.