Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
New York!” he said. “That’s not a place, it’s a dream.
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
Literature is integrated, and I’m not just talking about color or race. I’m talking about the power of literature to make us recognize – and again and again – the wholeness of the human experience.
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
I’d been so fascinated by the notion, that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I’d been asleep, dreaming.
Maybe it’s just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.
Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.
I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
So now they’re shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.