It’s usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
A man may say, “From now on I’m going to speak the truth.” But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking.
The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.
With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don’t cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don’t poison everything…
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.
If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution – a higher institution.
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.
If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.
He didn’t ask “Where will you spend eternity?” as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?
Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.
The human being now simply can’t close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one’s fellows perhaps prevent full buttoning by artists.
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: ‘by man came death’. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.
Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature.
Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay.
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don’t give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don’t want to lie more than is average.
Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.
What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all?
Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That’s how you can tell it’s valuable.
Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.
The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.
Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.
Shall I run back into the desert … and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven’t had enough desert yet.
No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.
You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real–the here-and-now. Seize the day.
The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.
Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.
God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.
Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.
Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.
New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.
People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change … the shriek of unused capacities.
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
Alternatives and particularly desirable alternatives grow only on imaginary trees.
The truth is we’ve not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.
Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters – not so much above the clatter as part of it.
Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.