There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.
One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.
It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.
Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.
We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
Read in order to live.
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Madame Bovary is myself.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
