If everything is done for me. . . how will I ever learn?
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
My life is a reading list.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
The future will either be green or not at all.
If you feed your mind as often as you feed your stomach, then you'll never have to worry about feeding your stomach or a roof over your head or clothes on your back.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
It didn't hurt my pride because I am Onew!