All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they migh...
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did eve...
I like to take on the thing I don't like at the moment. I like to find something that looks wrong or feels off, something that I would never have done in the past, like brocade. And then all of a sudden, if we can make brocade work, then we've really...
Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, t...
Some people don’t care about Christianity at all unless it can make them drunk or high “in the spirit.” They use and abuse God and Christianity just like they would use any other substance in their life. They search for the experiences, but not...
Most men - it is my experience - are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
True marriage enabled the two partners to stand upright as properly formed human beings. Through the union, each partner acquired his missing leg. For anyone who had the experience of using two legs, life wasn't worth living if one had to manage on a...
They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth ...
Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones, but in proport...
India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and a...
Visiting new places and meeting interesting people – even if "What remained after paying the rent for the Tel Aviv flat, which I shared with a roommate, and the tuition at university was close to nothing – it was the experiences that mattered.
You push people away, Marley. You don't realise it, but you do. You close yourself off to anyone and anything that doesn't fit in your perfect little hamster ball of life. But you can't experience love only on your own terms. It doesn't work that way...
Men are—by nature—stupid creatures. I think I can speak with some experience on this. Both as a man and well, a gay man. It's bad enough to be one of the stupid creatures. It's quite another to be attracted to them. Cursed at both ends: brain and...
We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love.
From a personal experience and the examination of literature, I feel that we cannot take for granted that a dialogue, without information and perhaps without understanding, is possible between any individuals or groups on all levels. So the prerequis...
Cannabis is renowned as a powerful hallucinogen in large doses, and certainly capable of inducing profound ecstatic ecstatic states. Anyone who who doubts this has clearly not experienced its effects.
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash.
While one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The school should help its young people to discover their vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be t...
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either ...
I need not to be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it. To try to escape from it is to try to live a lie. It is also to cease to be. My acceptance of despair and emptiness constitutes my being; to have...
Affordable Care Act" roll out isn't Obama's fault. It's what happens when you elect a President without any real-world business experience.
