169 quotes found
“Most of my reading is rereading.”
“Writing is a mysterious activity.”
“My library is an archive of longings.”
“The only interesting ideas are heresies”
“To the militant, identity is everything.”
“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
“One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.”
“Alone, alone. I am alone I ache Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, Im here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.”
“I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husband...”
“I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it c...”
“I dont care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces intelligence.”
“Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foo...”
“That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.”
“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”
“Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously chall...”
“The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselve...”
“Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”
“The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.”
“[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
“Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, mo...”
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]”
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.”
“With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.”
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.”
