About Nathanael West: Nathanael West was an American author, screenwriter and satirist.
It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on eath. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you wi...
Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.
You dedicate your life to the pursuit of pleasure. No over-indulgence, mind you, but knowing that your body is apleasure machine, you treat it carefully in order to get the most out of it.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all t...
It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.
Humanity...I'm a humanity lover. All the broken bastards...
He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.
...let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangle...
We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.
...better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table.
It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush.
