- Now, invulnerable, I was as solitary as one live tree in a vast landscape of coal.
- The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
- True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
- I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.
- Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.
- One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.
- People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
- Ultimately it come down to: are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that.
- The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
- An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.
- Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.
- The true artist gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful.
- When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.
- A common and usually unfortunate answer is "Write about what you know." Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.
- The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
- We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
- As a rule of thumb I say: if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
- Life is like a drawing without an eraser.
- Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
- We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.
- We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within... By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
- For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
- One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
- A generation doesn't have much choice in the problems that the forces of history throw in its lap. It does have a choice as to whether it will face those problems honestly.
- There can be order without freedom, but no freedom without some measure of order.
- Really, there are three kinds of things that are important in my things, I think. One is monsters, another is clowns, and another is human beings, and of course, they keep shapeshifting: one turns into the other.
- Clowns are always trying to be human beings. Human beings do things and clowns desperately try to imitate human beings. So the acrobat gets up on the wire, and then the clown wants to be an acrobat and he tries, but he's a straw man and he can't be. He's always acting. He's always pretending. He's always faking and mimicking. Many of us feel that about ourselves all the time. That is to say: we put on masks and never find out who we really are. And one of the things that happens in a novel is characters who start out as clowns try to earn the grade as human beings, and sometimes they turn into monsters instead. I mean by monsters, "walking dead". I mean nihilists, people who really have given up on all faith and so on, and act as if the world were evil, and as if all people were either stupid or malicious. They're creatures who have given in to the emotional war that's in everybody.
- On writer Jean-Paul Sartre: He's a horror intellectually, figuratively, and morally, but he's a wonderful writer and anything he says you believe, at least for the moment, because of the way he says it.
- The good society is not one that ignores individual differences but one that deals with them wisely and humanely.
- All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
- History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.
- Tedium is the worst pain.
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