It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can wal...
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashi...
I'll be damned if death wears my sadness as glad rags.
I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself...
I don't know anything any more, he said, and let a sleep lozenge dissolve on his tongue
I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the...
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.
Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change so...
Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the m...
Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived?
Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's...
We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from no...
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hug...
They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.
Life should be touched, not strangled.
Be your own self. Love what YOU love.
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.