Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry flowering above sister grass-daisies' pink tiny... bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sor...t of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy D...rew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty- five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while h...e was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us ...from the invisible world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrib...le. He must above all never worry about his effect on other people. Power requires that one do just that all the time. Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Say the woman is forty-four. Say she is five seven-and-a-half.... Say her hair is stick color. Say her eyes are chameleon. Would you put her in a sack and bury her, suck her down into the dumb dirt?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The horned pout (Pimelodus nebulosus), sometimes called Minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the... water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and, like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud. It bites deliberately, as if about its business.... They are extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off; a bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhabiting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest, and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »