I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
I’m inclined to think that a military background wouldn’t hurt anyone.
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.
It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything.
Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it… the basest of all things is to be afraid.
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books… Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
Pointless… like giving caviar to an elephant.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
“So I was having dinner with Garry Kasporov and there was a check tablecloth. It took him two hours to pass me the salt.”
