To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.
Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.
National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.
The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.
I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.
I found out pretty quickly that there is a lot of money to be made if you can become the kind of woman who doesn’t look like the kind of woman she is.
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.
Whatever she is now she's better than she was," said Bedloe. "Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.
I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.
Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don't know you, who you are, does it matter if we live or die?
You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being.
The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and it is true as well for pleasures that seem simpler and...
Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else ...
