I wanted to learn how to skate backwards and they wouldn't help me and they went off and left me on my own.
The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.
Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism. " If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.
Is he ever going to learn?
I believe in ceremony. I think ceremony is important, pomp and circumstance, tradition. I'm into those things.
Sometimes in love it just gets to the point where I have to give up. I have to give up trying and I have to give up believing because I know things won't change. To me, giving up isn't being weak. Giving up is being strong enough to let go.
When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.