Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Είναι μάλλον φανερό απ' όσα είπα έως τώρα ότι όχι μόνο είμαι υπαρξιστής, αλλά φτάνω και στο σημείο να πω ότι δεν γνωρίζουμε τη φύση μας. Απλώς μαθαίνουμε τον εαυτό μας όσο ζούμε τη ζωή μας. Και όσο μα...
There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes wa...
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow old or else pay more for remaining the same.
Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice...
Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was on...
No heart is so hard as the timid heart.
Metaphor reveals a writer’s true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.
If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?
He had been certain that religion was there for a very good practical reason. It couldn’t be simpler—you had to keep the weak and unruly in order. But a man of pride (such as himself) could do as he c...
For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most...
Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed t...
Don't bug me or I'll gas you said the creep
Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter—no matter how unsuited and unprepared—to a life of revenge. I
And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties...
About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their...
The Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.
I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routin...