I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.
Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
Artists are never complete people. But if it’s art that completes them, then what is taken away?
I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.
Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.
The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.
It’s true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.
Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.
There were words on our lips that in our loneliness alone wanted utterance, and the need by itself virtually created the feeling.
I’ve always admired stylists. I put the writers of bumphable, ready-to-wear prose, calculated to sell, guaranteed not to shock, in the same category as artists who can’t draw. There is a lack of bravery and a lot of fraud in them. I have tried never to write a book that didn’t attempt something new in the way of narrative technique. Writing is an assault on cliche. I find little to admire in writers who make no attempt at originality.
Art creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.
Darconville drew it all out to this paradox, that on the one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute...