Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
See the moon? It hates us.
Write about what you're afraid of.
Is death that which gives meaning to life?
Any genuine work of art generates new work.
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
How can you be alienated without first having been connected?
There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
Best not to anticipate too much ... it jiggles the possibilities.
The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
Food ... is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.
I am never needlessly obscure - I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.
The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.
The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.
Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don't count?
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?
Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.
Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.
We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.
The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.
Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven't heard of some of them.
The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
People always like to hear that they're under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they'd feel if they were told they weren't under stress.
Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that -- one need merely look out of the window, for example.
My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.