All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
Now is the age of anxiety.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.