The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage.
How we learn is what we learn.
Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.
our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.
Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.
The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.
Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.
I don't really deal with the attention I receive to be honest. I build up a fantasy world around me that I inhabit. I cherry pick elements of literature, music, film, history and art, then weave them together to construct a fantasy reality to live in. It doesn't always work out though, I got evicted from my own fantasy once, which was quite embarrassing.
Envy, like flame, blackens that which is above it, and which it cannot reach.
In mathematics there are no true controversies.
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?