Life is not permanent problems with the goal of obtaining peace. Its permanent peace with occasional problems.
Even Buddhist priests of the same temple quarrel occasionally.
We were the first people who did investigative stuff, who asked occasionally abrasive, occasionally confrontational questions.
All beautiful women are murderers. You've probably heard it said before.
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
I regard myself as someone who is retired but who occasionally goes out to work. In fact, I'm offered so much good stuff that it's not so occasional.
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Sally: Of course, I may bring a boyfriend home occasionally, but only occasionally, because I do think that one ought to go to the man's room if one can. I mean, it doesn't look so much as if one expected it, does it?
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contac...
Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the sy...
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.
