Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
Let your repentance salt my shoe leather, I said presently, and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love.
Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my 'Inquirey', starting at walls hunting ducks...
Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?
There was some simple, radical difference about him. He hoped it was genius, feared it was madness, devoted himself to amiability and inconspicuousness.
So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't...
Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a min...
But I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it’s meant to be a house; that is, a place of amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too badly frigh...
Remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.
Path's should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid
Innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent.
Non c'era ragione di far niente. I miei occhi, come Winckelmann diceva impropriamente delle statue greche, erano senza sguardo, fissi all'eternità, puntati al fine ultimo, e quando così stanno le cose...
Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare no...
The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty’s signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I’d murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn’t wi...
Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder...
So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if youprefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and...
One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I si...
How come you write the way you do? an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, Because Samuel B...
All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.