For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.
Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there’s enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough – whatever it takes.
I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I’m talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it’s a matter of decorum, basically.
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it’s – like Aristotle’s Physics – an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal.
Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It’s a conceptual art.
As a teacher, it’s a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don’t believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone – in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.
The things that stayed were things that didn’t matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.
What else is soul but a listener?
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.
My face is muffled in my mother’s clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.
I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
Getting even is one reason for writing.