We've had the goddam Ages of Faith, we've had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity
Stupidity’s the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
None of us grew but the business.
If we believe that love is weakness? And people resent it, because they think it’s an admission of weakness, they draw away from it… and that’s why you kill the thing you love, because it’s your weakn...
I, it’s just, listen, criticism? It’s the most important art now, it’s the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don’t you see? not the if I’d done it myself . . . Ye...
Human, we treat them as we treat others, take for granted services to which they did not pretend. But we force telephones to corrupt intimacy while they pretend to preserve it by keeping alive only it...
The face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.
You and I doctor, on the beach.
What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey
That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out.
Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it fr...
Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed,...
Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest.
I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who , and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the o...
I can't imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie
How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it...
But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice
We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again,-Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says,...