To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition – but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right.
There is something sacred about great suffering, and it is the sacredness that makes the pain endurable.
Everything we want is nothing here.
Life can sometimes seem hopelessly complex, unpredictable, chaotic. Then a strange order makes itself known.
This is an age when freedoms are fragile. Those in power speak loudly, ceaselessly about compassion but rarely exhibit any.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, which he painted in 1781.
When a scientist tells you that ‘the science is settled’ in regard to any subject,” Lamar said, “he’s ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another. The entire history of science is that nothing in science is ever settled. New discoveries are continuously made, and they upend old certainties.
Joe never married, and he lived alone all his life. He had no need of four chairs, and yet he built the extra three, perhaps as an expression of hope.
Your cousin Paulie, he has prostate cancer. Who knew he’s man enough to have a prostate?
My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist – musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist – is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a carpenter and a mason and an engineer. A great artist intuitively understands how the world is built and how it works and how people best fit into it. That’s how they’re able to create beauty – because they know the truth of things. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
They rarely speak, for the evergreen forests and the golden meadows and the great mountains rising to bare-rock summits are nature’s version of a cathedral.
And the time of death is always.
I think the past might be our future, that we’re busy laying the groundwork for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity.
There’s nowhere on Earth where people haven’t died in sorry ways.
The Japanese had a highly developed sense of propriety, a complex system of social graces, and a very rigid set of standards concerning the conduct of personal relationships.
According to the EPA, all the booming was – I quote – ’only mechanical sonic devices that simulate.
She steps into the hallway and rushes after the woman.
Among those busy hornets of the law, Durand Calaphas is unique.
A fugitive is safest when the posse that’s after him is frightened and filled with division.
They were conducting an experiment to learn to what extent sound has an effect, positive or negative, on algae.
This was, after all, how some of the best things happened in life – by the mysterious working of synchronicity, incredible coincidence.