Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you su...ffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ...ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute opt...imism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you con...demn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming... to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and giggles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open- eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feeling...s for which it is impossible to become a sham.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been... greater than the power of sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one i...nto the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face o...f pain; and some of our griefs ... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »