From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
Work. Don't Think. Relax.
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
Surprise is where creativity comes in.
Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
Après tout, on vit à l'époque des Kleenex. On fait avec les gens comme avec les mouchoirs, on froisse après usage, on jette, on en prend un autre, on se mouche, on froisse, on jette. Tout le monde se sert des basques du voisin.
Il sentit son corps se scinder en deux, devenir chaleur et froidure, tendresse et dureté, tremblement et impassibilité, chaque moitié grinçant contre l'autre.
On doit tous être pareils. Nous ne naissons pas libres et égaux, comme le proclame la Constitution, on nous rend égaux. Chaque homme doit être l'image de l'autre, comme ça, tout le monde est content; plus de montagnes pour les intimider, leur donner un point de comparaison. Conclusion ! Un livre est un fusil chargé dans la maison d'à côté. Brûlons-le. Déchargeons l'arme. Battons en brèche l'esprit humain. Qui sait qui pourrait être la cible de l'homme cultivé ?
The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?
The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
