Untidy is perhaps too mild a word; slut would be a better one. Being a slut is of course partly a matter of bad luck as well as ba...d management: things just do boil over oftener, fuses blow sooner, front doors bang leaving us outside in our dressing-gowns; but it goes deeper than bad luck. We are not actually incapable of cleaning our homes: but we are liable to reorganize instead of scrub; we do our cleaning in a series of periodic assaults. A mother-in- law has only to appear over the horizon and we act like the murderer in a Ray Bradbury story who kept on wiping the finger prints off the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. We work in a frenzy; but ... the frenzy usually subsides before we have got everything back into the cupboards again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and ...when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. Th...e old grow beyond corruption very quickly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it complet...ely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to bu...rn down everything they ever did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of inno...vative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »