With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Writerβs block is only a failure of the ego.
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and oneβs passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
