It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
Women, fire in their crotch, won’t burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
Who’ll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?
We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
What I’m going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor’s puked-up face. Pale turd.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted …
He doesn’t blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
Driving is boring,” Rabbit pontificates, “but it’s what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him — so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.
They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.
Oh,’ she says, ‘the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
One of the cool chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it.
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings… Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures – if not happiness – its hopeful pursuit.
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
I must say, when I reread myself, it’s the poetry I tend to look at. It’s the most exciting to write, and it’s over the quickest.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.