You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.
He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone….
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Well, I’m about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to.
all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there’s no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.
Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.
Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends.
Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky.
The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time.
I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.
The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses—people who were total self-creations.
The average personality re-shapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul-desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change.
A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman—you are as an animal—’an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus.
All children are morbid: it’s their one saving grace.
Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.
If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?
Fitzgerald has charm. It’s a silly word, but it’s an exact word for me. I like ‘The Great Gatsby’ and it’s sad, gay nostalgia.
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.
The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.
The answer is good things only happen to you if you’re good. Good? Honest is more what I mean… Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode.
Those fellows, they’re always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.
Duntz asked Smith, ‘Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?’ ‘Between forty and fifty dollars.
Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.
But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
…he called after her as shedisappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry…
Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.
What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.
What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.
And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
It’s bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.
I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman because he’ll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist.
I’ve always seen myself as a winner even as a kid. If I hadn’t I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I’ve got something inside of me peasantlike and stubborn and I’m in it ’til the end of the race.
Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
Fame is only good for one thing – they will cash your check in a small town.
When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.