Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
I could never really manage to tell reality and my dream world apart, for the two of them co-existed together as they slid over top of each other.
Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.
Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another, -- which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.
The cliche that sea dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy.
I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.
On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.
She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface...
Most wives fuck their husbands, just to ensure financial support. Marriage is just a form of legalized prostitution, when you really thought about it.
I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.
If any accolades come in the writing of this story, all praise will be His, all Glory will rightly go to Him. If He will allow me to share some part in this, I am truly humbled.
The apple . . . came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.
I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.
Feelings are like blankets, covering you up so you can't see clearly, or like mazes you can too easily get lost inside. I am terrified of getting lost.
Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
