Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe...
No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.
Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, Why are things the way they are? Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which...
I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousan...
If the weather isn't bad and it's a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open...
I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since.
I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble?
How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred fo...
Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibili...
He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Fre...
Come se nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore ci fosse la purezza. Il cielo aiuti un simile scrittore! Come se Joyce non avesse annusato oscenamente le mutande di Nora. Come se nell’anima di Dostoev...
But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier...
But how will I get out? And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. How'd you do that? I said. I opened the door, he said. But how? He shrugged. I pushed. I just...
But from within the carton, Morty's American flag - which I know is folded there, at the very bottom, in the official way - tells me, It's against some Jewish law, and so, on into the car he went with...
Bisogna fare una distinzione tra il morire e la morte. Non è tutto un morire ininterrotto. Se si è sani e ci si sente bene, è un morire invisibile. La fine, che è una certezza, non dev'essere per forz...
Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the u...
As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark—or Europe or the Pacific—in the summer of 1944.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in huma...