But I, Caesar, have not sought to amass wealth by the practice of my art, having been rather contented with a small fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance accompanied by a want of reputation.
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember thee?
A crowd of drunken lovers. Newspaper hats, new couples falling from couches and love- seats—the pleasure remembered, never the regret.
If you think you are the mermaid, think again. You are the ocean holding the mermaid afloat, trying to change the world one dolphin at a time.
Nasib memang diserahkan kepada manusia untuk digarap, tetapi takdir harus ditandatangani di atas materai dan tidak boleh digugat kalau nanti terjadi apa-apa, baik atau buruk.
In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.
This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.
He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.
No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
Provide for her Future—if you can!—That's my motto!—But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past!
I stood before her asserting my age, but in truth not knowing where the years had gone or how they had led up to this moment.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part are more than a trifle insane
