The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, whi...
The common people?—pah. What are they to us? You and I, mein Freund, we are lords of the earth, the great ones, the major men, the makers of supreme fictions.
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. For
Oh, by the way, the plot: it almost slipped my mind. Charlie French bought my mother’s pictures cheap and sold them dear to Binkie Behrens, then bought them cheap from Binkie and sold them on to Max M...
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater...
Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.
It was not a wave but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself.
In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.
I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment’s notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying,
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My sou...
Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.
Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves
Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.
Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and y...
By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious o...
Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one's feet.
At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of evening drowsed and dreamed, swaying in...
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
Żaden szczegół ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dłuższej obserwacji.