For guilt was the existential edge of sex. Without guilt, sex was meaningless.
Finally he said, I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote. It wasn’t so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life b...
The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture
Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.
We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one e...
We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.
Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are stil...
There was a way, of course, to deal with the papers. If the ears of the reporters were geared to capture accurately the mediocre remarks of mediocre men, then one had to look for simple salient statem...
The best they could? I don’t think so. He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in...
Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.
Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout.
Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fight...
Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives.
I was in love with a beautiful, brilliant girl who was married to the most elegant and incisive gent I had ever met; there was no hope for me but, oh, the love was beautiful. Mr.
I live by the law of averages, said Alois. I prefer to think of the ongoing possibility of profit rather than of the intermittent perils that surround all activity.
He knew that again now. Hennessey’s death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd d...
You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity los...
Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it...
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.