Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French, which was so poor that even the simplest tasks – deciphering menus, buying bl...
When I'm working I'm wishing I was doing nothing and when I'm doing nothing I'm wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I've got to do and then, when I've got nothing to do, I keep glan...
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a r...
The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves ou...
That is why Lawrence, like Rilke, hated photographs of himself. To both writers photographs prefigured an end of becoming.
So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war’s true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war...
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was...
In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited. In such a society there would be no more essays on whether...
In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of Our Song. The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is...
People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they wan...
Like the time he’d dashed into Minton’s out of the pouring rain and seen this kid playing tenor, making it wail and wriggle around like the horn was a bird whose neck he was trying to wring. Breathing...
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff
The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.
He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.
You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
In Dillard it's the comedy of rapture. Or at least it's a comedy that permits prose and thought to soar while inoculating the rapturous against the three ills of which nature writers should live in pe...
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It w...
I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing th...
I’ve always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how mu...
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