And what about all the good I have in my heart—doesn’t it mean anything?
All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to...
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough des...
It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts...
And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn't know where to begin.
A man is only as good as what he loves.
Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?
Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
The hour that burst the spirit's sleep...
How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in dem...
He didn't ask Where will you spend eternity? as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?
Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate peopl...
Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.
Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and unce...
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.