The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel – and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...
Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.
Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.
Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
It’s one of the things writing students don’t understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don’t understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.
The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.
They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.
Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.
The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.
Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.
A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer.
If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.
In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.
Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell.