Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars...
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resista...
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like ...
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
We are evidently preparing," he said, "to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet.
Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. "I fry mine in butter!" indeed.
You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.