Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.
The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
We live at the edge of the miraculous.
If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
