High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life.
-The little comfort of love?-Is that comfort so little?-Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
When I stop [working] the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working.
Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.
Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure...
I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I...
The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't yo...
I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?
I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything anything I ever did I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.
I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing...
Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pi...
I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then...
We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? --- I wish I knew ...Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can ...[More croquet sounds]Later tonight I'm going to tell you I love you an' maybe by...