No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that loo...ked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do... not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no- quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that h...as not heretofore been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you... read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently.... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you ...make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writ...ers have had it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come i...nto a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A playwright ... is ... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the a...udience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of... everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »