Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
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...
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...
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...
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...
All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.
A man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet.
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.
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...
Self knowledge is always bad news.
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...
Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.