There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.
Time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of – level of – rot in them.
I never met a woman that didn’t know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they’ve got.
Sometimes a man has got to hock his sweet used-to-be in order to finance his present situation...
Of coherency, I usually attempt it.
Some single men stop drinking when they git married and others start!
When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion.
One man has one great true thing in his life. One great good thing that is true!
To know me is not to love me. At.
I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one-hundred-per-cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.
I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!
The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me. They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all. When that happens I will be nothing because I cannot be a professional writer.
Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is.
The carrion birds have tried to peck out my eyes and my tongue and my mind, but they’ve never been able to get at my heart.
Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.
I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.
Sometimes we sleep too long in the afternoon and when we wake we find things changed, Signora.
And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don’t let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don’t let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!
I knew before asking the gypsy that something of this sort would happen to you. You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that’s not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated here! It has to be extinguished or used only to light up your nose for Mr. Gutman’s amusement.