Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who’s lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.
Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you’re happy, it’s an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world.
It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.
There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all.
We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing.
I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader’s own life.
The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. ” Ragtime.
I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.
And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.
Suppose I could prove to you that there are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet. Suppose I could demonstrate that you yourself are an instrumentation in our modern age of trends.
A book is not complete until it’s read.
All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.
I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.
A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.
The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.
And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.
When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself, who was to die in grief not long thereafter, would survive Wilson’s abhorrence of war.
Why does there have to be promise before destruction?
What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience.
I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying home his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.