(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Your self…is other people, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.
They were Archer’s second set of children an d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.
Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality then it is a quality of the spirit.
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous – and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.
It’s not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives – lends verisimilitude to what you are doing – it’s that it feeds the imagination.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting you have the people on the right. But the train’s on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.