Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't...
We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe
Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them b...
They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.
Sex is like money only too much is enough.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and
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.
In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous stra...
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
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.
Growth is betrayal.
But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where w...
My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservat...
The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow.