The superior person is calm and composed; the lesser person is continuously worried and distressed.
Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.
. . . life is short and the world is wide
Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.
Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.
Art for art's sake, money for God's sake.
. . . dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades, it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?
I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake.
A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.