If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.
Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.
Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
He couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.
With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.
I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I’ve come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.
if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want
if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.
As a writer, I like the list of “things to strive for” that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigorous dramatization of story
Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.
He’s been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he’s come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he’s an art bum…