Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or... the other. It is usually both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job an...d a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense ...a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes... of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is in every either-or a certain naivete which may well befit the evaluator, but ill- becomes the thinker, for whom opposites... dissolve in series of transitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[There is] an abiding miscommunication between the intellect and the soul. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, ...but too little intellect in matters of soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remai...ning ones can be arranged however one likes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which change...s with every step one takes on it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »