You can’t have a church town without belief and you can’t have belief without intolerance.
If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?
How do you go on knowing that you will never again – not ever, ever – see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?
But he didn’t have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn’t it?
A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn’t always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.
An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.
So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.
People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn’t funny at all. It’s appalling and tragic.
I wouldn’t dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf – which aren’t truly sports anyway.
Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
Looking back, I realise it wasn’t only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn’t knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn’t they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?
I’ve always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother’s friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.
Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
The ‘Reader’s Digest’ used to run a feature called ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ The new wisdom – post-Trump and Brexit – is that it doesn’t.
I have a son, but I’ve never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.