Until I met you," she said, "I never realized how precious each day could be. When I was working, each day was over before I knew it, and then a week just flew by, and then a whole year...What have I been doing all this time? Why didn't I meet you be...
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasur...
Lat at nigh have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were mean to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't pain, an entrepreneur who never starts a ventur...
Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were biggest and strongest, elected the greatest gen...
A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, ...
I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, o...
Of course, owls on the loose seemed strange to the uninitiated. One day an electrician came to work on the building's power supply, when, seemingly out of nowhere, an owl flew around a corner right at him. The poor guy let out an unearthly scream and...
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if...
When I see a poor person I think of me, and then I think, maybe I should pay my clones for all the work they do for me. Then I think, nah, they’re only slaves. Through my clones, I am a slave to myself.
My dear sister, you can’t escape God, and you can’t escape your skeletons in the closet. They will always be there until you take them out from behind those dusty old moth-eaten coats. Your exterior facade of ‘everything is alright’ only work...
His jaw was clenched. His breathing became labored, like he was carrying something heavy. She watched the muscles in his throat working, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed, hard. Victory. At that moment, she knew he wouldn’t try to stop her. Sh...
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and...
Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigid...
Let's worry like mad. Shall we start on a worldwide basis and work down to ourselves, or start with ourselves and spread?" "I'm going to do me-and-Peter and that dead man." "All right. I'm just going to do a wee one about Bunny and then I'll join you...
It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think a...
First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over . In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned h...
Patanjali says that we can meditate on anything that our heart desires. The important thing is not what we meditate on, but more that we meditate. And then gradually to meditate more and more on what corresponds to the innermost longing of our heart....
Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold ...
Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind...
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: '...
Sometimes, when I look at my work at the newspaper and squint in just the right way, I can even see it as a microcosm of democracy itself. After all, every staff member participates in the creation of each issue. I solicit their ideas. I value the co...
