We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
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I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build, and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle S...
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Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Ho...
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The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the per...
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like n...
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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
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Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
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Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
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People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.
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The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
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The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.
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