Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.
The marriage seemed to flourish on Father’s extended absences. ” Ragtime
Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates’ name. And that is because Socrates’ ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
[Freud] “sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.” Ragtime
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” –